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      The new Trump charges are shocking. But his White House odds won’t change | Lloyd Green

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      On Monday night, a grand jury in Fulton county, Georgia, delivered a 41-count, 98-page felony indictment. Donald Trump and the names of 18 co-defendants litter its pages. Prosecutors allege that Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Sidney Powell and a passel of lackeys illegally interfered with the 2020 election and violated Georgia’s anti-racketeering statute.Trump helmed a “criminal enterprise”, the indictment alleges. He now stands in the shoes of a purported mob boss. Said differently, the likely 2024 Republican presidential nominee personifies the spirit of Tony Soprano.In hindsight, the so-called “perfect” phone call was anything but that. His request that Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, “find 11,780 votes” has returned to haunt him.“On or about the 2nd day of January 2021, DONALD JOHN TRUMP and MARK RANDALL MEADOWS committed the felony offense of SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH BY PUBLIC OFFICER,” Count 1 of the indictment contends. The duo had unlawfully solicited Raffensperger “to engage in conduct constituting the felony offense of Violation of Oath by Public Officer ….”Meanwhile, Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor turned Trump consigliere, allegedly peddled lie after lie to state legislators. According to the indictment, Giuliani repeatedly “made false statements concerning fraud in the November 3, 2020, presidential election”. In June 2021, a New York court suspended his law license. Facing a raft of investigations, he seeks to sell his Manhattan apartment for $6.5m.The 45th president’s rhetorical attacks on witnesses, prosecutors and the court pose a potential legal headache here. Earlier in the day, Trump trashed Geoff Duncan, Georgia’s Republican former lieutenant governor, who was among the last witnesses to testify before the grand jury. Georgia law authorizes bail only where the defendant poses “no significant risk of intimidating witnesses or otherwise obstructing the administration of justice”.“Trump was the worst candidate ever, in the history of our party,” Duncan remarked as he left Monday night. “We are going to have to pivot from there.” Maybe, but not before the 2024 election.Georgia joins Michigan in charging Republican activists in connection with efforts to allegedly subvert the 2020 election. Last month, Dana Nessel, Michigan’s Democratic attorney general, announced the indictment of 16 Republicans who she said falsely stated that they were Michigan’s “duly elected and qualified electors” for president and vice president.The message of the insurrection lives. On Saturday, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida told Trump and Iowa Republicans that “only through force do we make any change…” Days earlier, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene laughed about the idea of executing her political rivals. Last week, the FBI fatally shot an armed Utah man who had threatened Joe Biden. Violence lurks.Seven in 10 Republicans view the Biden presidency as seriously tainted or illegitimate. That perception will further solidify. Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, recently announced that a special counsel would investigate Hunter Biden, the president’s wayward son. Garland had expanded the remit of David Weiss, the Trump-appointed US attorney in charge of the prosecution of Hunter Biden.At the same time, a filing by the US Department of Justice revealed that the government and the younger Biden’s legal team had reached an impasse. Practically speaking, the likelihood of both Trump and Hunter standing trial is no longer speculative.For Biden and the Democrats this is a “Houston, we have a problem” moment. Given Hunter’s apparent attraction to drugs, guns, money and sex, his trial would possess the trappings of a circus and soap opera, complete with a readily digestible narrative.But it doesn’t end there. A trial stands to shine a spotlight on Biden Inc and the ways that the president’s family seems to have cashed in on the Biden name during Joe Biden’s time in public life. Beyond that, and equally worrisome for Democrats, is the possibility that the trial might amplify the president’s silence, if not acquiescence or more, in his family’s financial endeavors.On the one hand, Biden as a senator was among the poorer members of the august body. “I entered as one of the poorest men in Congress, left one of the poorest men in government – in Congress and as vice president,” he said during a 2020 debate. On the other hand, Biden managed to live well, or at least well enough.From October onward, Trump faces a blizzard of litigation. The Iowa caucus coincides with another E Jean Carroll defamation trial. Fani Willis, the Fulton county prosecutor, wants her case to go to trial in the next six months, with all 19 defendants in the same courtroom.Trump’s extensive legal woes burden his campaign. By the numbers, roughly 30 cents out of every one-dollar contribution helps keep him free and his battery of lawyers sated. Yet his earlier indictments fueled a fundraising spurt and a rise in the polls. Small donors are fine with paying for Trump’s legal team. In contrast, Ron DeSantis is in retrograde, changing his campaign team more often than his socks.Against this backdrop, the Fulton county indictment is best viewed as a potentially surmountable and televised obstacle for Trump and his minions.
      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992 More

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      Hunter Biden lawyers say collapsed plea deal on gun charge remains valid

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      Lawyers for Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden who has been under a years-long federal investigation over failing to pay taxes and, separately, illegally possessing a gun, said that part of the plea deal which unexpectedly fell apart in July remains “valid and binding”, in a Sunday court filing.Federal prosecutors, led by US attorney David Weiss, had on Friday asked the court to cancel its request that the two sides reach a renewed agreement on the deal “since there is no longer a plea agreement or diversion agreement for the Court to consider”.But Hunter Biden’s lawyers said the guilty pleas were “separate and independent” from the diversion agreement that is set to drop his felony gun charges after two years. They said the diversion agreement was executed at the July hearing even as the overall deal collapsed and Hunter Biden intends to abide by its terms.The court has “acknowledged in its filings agreeing to the public disclosure of the Plea and Diversion Agreements – that the parties have a valid and binding bilateral Diversion Agreement”, Hunter Biden’s lawyers wrote in their Sunday filing, responding to prosecutors’ Friday motion.Weiss, a Trump appointee who has been investigating Hunter Biden in a Delaware district court since 2018, has asked the court to dismiss the case so that federal prosecutors can bring additional tax charges against him outside of the state, including in California and DC, and bring the case to trial.“After the hearing, the parties continued negotiating but reached an impasse. A trial is therefore in order,” Weiss wrote in a different Friday court filing. “And that trial cannot take place in this District because, as explained, venue does not lie here.”Attorney General Merrick Garland on Friday appointed Weiss special counsel to oversee the ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden. Weiss had earlier in the week asked Garland for the post, which gives him independence from the Department of Justice, a budget to pursue the investigation and the ability to bring charges in any federal jurisdiction.“Upon considering his request, as well as the extraordinary circumstances relating to this matter, I have concluded it is in the public interest to appoint him as special counsel,” Garland said in a surprise press conference.The plea deal fell apart after the Delaware judge assigned to the case, Maryellen Noreika, who was appointed by Trump, said she could not accept its terms. The two sides also clashed over whether Hunter Biden could face additional charges over his overseas business dealings, with his lawyers saying that he couldn’t and federal prosecutors saying he could.In their Sunday court filing, Hunter Biden’s lawyers wrote that his understanding of immunity was “based on the express written terms of the Diversion Agreement” and sought to levy the blame for the collapsed plea deal on the federal prosecution, saying it was their decision to “renege” on the agreement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe ongoing investigation into the president’s son, led by Weiss, does create new challenges for Joe Biden’s re-election campaign in 2024. Republicans in the House of Representatives are also investigating the Biden family’s “domestic and overseas dealings” and whether they interfere with the president’s ability to lead impartially, as well as national security.Yet many decried Weiss’s appointment, saying he “can’t be trusted” after negotiating a “sweetheart plea deal” that a judge rejected.“This move by Attorney General Garland is part of the justice department’s efforts to attempt a Biden family coverup,” said the GOP-led House oversight committee chair James Comer, of Kentucky, in a statement following Garland’s announcement. More

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      Donald Trump braced for fourth criminal indictment – US politics live

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      From 3h agoGood morning, US politics blog readers. The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia is expected to seek multiple charges against more than a dozen defendants, including the former president, this week.The timeline for when the district attorney, Fani Willis, would present evidence to a grand jury came into sharper relief over the weekend after prosecutors summoned the former Georgia lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, and reporter George Chidi to testify on Tuesday.The presentation is expected to take two days, to a grand jury that meets Mondays and Tuesdays. In Georgia, it is typical for prosecutors to ask a grand jury to return indictments the same day. The notifications are the clearest indication that the prosecutors intend to charge the former president this week.Prosecutors have identified roughly seven statutes of the Georgia state criminal code – including a racketeering charge, election law crimes as well as other non-election law crimes – with which to charge more than a dozen defendants in a sprawling indictment, the Guardian reported today, citing sources.Here’s what else we’re watching today:
      10.30am Eastern time: President Joe Biden will depart Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, for the White House.
      1pm: Biden and vice president Kamala Harris will have lunch.
      3pm. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief the press.
      The House and Senate are out.
      Donald Trump appeared to warn former Georgia lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, against testifying before the Fulton County grand jury in the state’s 2020 election investigation.“I am reading reports that failed former Lt. Governor of Georgia, Jeff Duncan, will be testifying before the Fulton County Grand Jury,” Trump posted on Truth Social today.Trump added:
      He shouldn’t. I barely know him but he was, right from the beginning of this Witch Hunt, a nasty disaster for those looking into the Election Fraud that took place in Georgia.
      His post came days after the US district judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s January 6 case in Washington DC, warned against making “inflammatory statements” that could intimidate witnesses in that trial.Duncan confirmed he had been asked to testify before the grand jury on Tuesday hearing evidence of alleged meddling in the 2020 presidential election.“Republicans should never let honesty be mistaken for weakness,” Duncan tweeted.The US will send Ukraine a new military aid package worth around $200m, secretary of state Antony Blinken announced.The latest security aid package includes air defense munitions, artillery rounds, anti-armor capabilities, and additional mine-clearing equipment, according to the statement.For more updates on Russia’s war in Ukraine, please follow our live blog. After five years, the US attorney pursuing Hunter Biden has only been able to file tax and unlawful gun possession charges – and that shouldn’t change just because the prosecutor has been named special counsel in the case, the lawyer for the president’s son has said.“If anything changes from his conclusion … the question [that] should be asked [is] what infected the process that was not the facts and the law?” Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. Lowell also said: “There’s no new evidence to be found.“Only thing that will change is the scrutiny on some of the charges.”Lowell’s remarks came after the US attorney in Delaware who has been investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings, David Weiss, received an appointment on Thursday to become special counsel over the case.The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, has said Weiss told him days earlier that “in his judgment, his investigation [had] reached a stage at which he should continue his work as a special counsel, and he asked to be appointed”. Garland added that he granted the request of Weiss – who was appointed to his post by Joe Biden’s presidential successor Donald Trump – having concluded that it was “in the public interest” to do so.Yet Garland’s justification did little to dampen a political firestorm in Washington DC. Weiss’s probe into Biden’s son is set to continue on a track that is parallel to special counsel investigations into Trump – the Republican frontrunner to challenge Biden in the 2024 race for the White House – which have produced a multitude of criminal charges against him.Democratic presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr’s campaign on Sunday evening tried to walk back on comments he made earlier in the day in support of a nationwide abortion restriction after the first three months of pregnancy.In an interview at the Iowa State Fair, Kennedy told NBC News that he believes “a decision to abort a child should be up to the women during the first three months of life”.Asked if he would sign a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks or 21 weeks of pregnancy if he were elected president, he said “yes, three months”.
      Once a child is viable, outside the womb, I think then the state has an interest in protecting the child.
      But in a later statement, Kennedy’s campaign team said he had “misunderstood” the reporter’s questions, citing a “crowded” and “noisy” exhibit hall at the fair.The statement continued:
      Mr Kennedy’s position on abortion is that it is always the woman’s right to choose. He does not support legislation banning abortion.
      In response, NBC reporter Ali Vitali shared a transcript of the full exchange and said she asked her questions multiple times to make sure the presidential candidate understood the subject.Twice impeached and now arrested and indicted three times. Donald Trump faces serious criminal charges in New York, Florida and Washington over a hush-money scheme during the 2016 election, his alleged mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.As Trump prepares for those cases to go to trial, the former president is simultaneously reeling from a verdict that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation toward writer E Jean Carroll. A New York jury awarded Carroll, who accused Trump of assaulting her in 1996, $5m in damages.And more criminal charges could be on the way for Trump in Georgia as early as this week.Here is where each case against Trump stands:Prosecutors investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia have gathered evidence directly connecting members of the former president’s legal team to the voting system breach in Coffee County, according to a report.Prosecutors have taken a special interest in the breach of voting machines in Coffee county by Trump allies because of the brazen nature of the operation and the possibility that Trump was aware that his allies intended to covertly gain access to the machines.In a series of particularly notable incidents, forensics experts hired by Trump allies copied data from virtually every part of the voting system, which is used statewide in Georgia, before uploading them to a password-protected website that could be accessed by 2020 election deniers.Investigators are in possession of text messages and emails indicating the breach was a top-down push by Trump’s team to access sensitive voting software, CNN reported, citing sources.Six days before pro-Trump operatives gained unauthorized access to voting systems, the local elections official who allegedly helped facilitate the breach shared a “written invitation” to attorneys working for Trump, according to the report.Investigators have also probed the involvement of Trump’s then attorneys, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, the sources said.Georgia former state senator Jen Jordan has been spotted at the Fulton County courthouse today, according to NBC.Jordan had been expected to testify before a grand jury as part of the Georgia prosecutor’s investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn his election loss in the state.The indictment that the Fulton County district attorney, Fanis Willis, may bring against Donald Trump as early as this week could be the most sprawling case against the former president in response to his efforts to remain in power after losing the 2020 election.“I think people are going to be surprised at the level of preparedness and the level of sophistication of the prosecution,” Clint Rucker, a former prosecutor in Fulton County, told AP.He added that he was not surprised the investigation has taken so long. While Willis is likely to let her team of prosecutors handle the trial, he said there was no question that she is calling the shots.
      When she says stuff like, ‘We’re ready to go,’ that’s not being braggadocious’. It’s her saying pretty much to anybody who’s interested, ‘Look, we’re ready.’
      The synopsis for a Fani Willis biopic would probably go something like this:
      In Fulton county, the first Black woman to serve as district attorney takes on an unlikely case. Willis grew up attending court with her father, a defense attorney and Black Panther. Now, she sits on the opposite side of the courtroom, hoping to indict a former president who sought to overturn election results and often espoused white supremacist rhetoric while doing so.
      The film’s montage would pull from real life, depicting a determined, unflappable Willis relentlessly poring over documents, leading her team through the long work hours and security risks that come with bringing an indictment against an often inflammatory former president, even as national attention on the case reached a groundswell.We’d watch her face racist threats and unsubstantiated rumors of misconduct, but she’d refuse to back down from the task at hand. She’d advocate for what she believed to be right even when it wasn’t popular. She’d appear in press conferences and in media interviews delivering stern soundbites such as: “Lady justice is actually blind. This is the reality. If you come into my community and you commit a crime, you deserve to be held responsible.”According to some of Willis’s colleagues who have worked with her over more than 20 years, all of this would be an accurate depiction of the district attorney.Defense attorney Brian Steel has known Willis her entire career and says she’s both “extremely honest” and “extremely hard working”. Atlanta NAACP president Gerald Griggs described her as “transparent”, a “zealous advocate for the state” and the “best trial attorney” in the Fulton county district attorney’s office. He said:
      What you see on TV is authentic to who she really is.
      Read the Guardian’s full profile of Willis here. The district attorney’s office in Georgia has spent more than two years investigating whether Donald Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in Georgia, including impaneling a special grand jury that made it more straightforward to compel evidence from recalcitrant witnesses.Unlike in the federal system, grand juries in the state of Georgia need to already be considering an indictment when they subpoena documents and testimony. By using a special grand jury, prosecutors can collect evidence without the pressure of having to file charges.The special grand jury in the Trump investigation heard evidence for roughly seven months and recommended indictments of more than a dozen people including the former president himself, its forewoman strongly suggested in interviews with multiple news outlets.Trump’s legal team sought last month to invalidate the work of the special grand jury and have the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, disqualified from proceedings, but the Georgia supreme court rejected the motion, ruling that Trump lacked “either the facts or the law necessary to mandate Ms Willis’s disqualification”.From his Bedminster club in New Jersey, where Trump spends his summers, the former president unleashed a wave of personal attacks against Willis ahead of what would be his fourth indictment after most recently being charged by special counsel Jack Smith with conspiring to subvert the 2020 election.Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that Willis was “racist” and treated gang members with “kid gloves” – two accusations without any merit, especially given her office last week prosecuted members of the PDE gang in Atlanta with a Rico charge and street gang terrorism.In the weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and his allies kicked off an aggressive pressure campaign in an attempt to overturn the election results in six swing states where certified results declared Joe Biden the winner.Nowhere was the effort more acute than in Georgia, which became the consuming focus of the former president and his allies, according to a Washington Post report today. Those close to Trump pushed state officials to identify fraud that would cast Biden’s victory in doubt, it writes.
      In the process, they personally targeted individual election workers with false claims of cheating, unleashing waves of threats, and amplified conspiracy theories about rigged machines that persist today. In the end, after Trump sought to use every lever of power to overturn the results, top state Republicans stood in his way, refusing to buckle under the pressure.
      Some of the most fantastical claims of fraud came directly from Trump and his allies, “who amplified baseless accusations on conservative media and unleashed new waves of outlandish tips from rank-and-file Republicans”.The former president’s accusations also turned election workers in Georgia and other states into targets of harassment and threats.
      They spread false claims that thousands of mail ballots should be discarded because of questionable signatures, that a mother-daughter team of election workers in Atlanta had triple-tallied counterfeit votes, that voting machines had been programmed to flip votes from one candidate to another.
      For the purposes of the Trump case, prosecutors in Georgia will be required to show an “interrelated pattern of activity by and through the [public] office” predicated on at least two “qualifying” or predicate crimes drawn from a list of specific statutes.The prosecutors on the Trump case have developed evidence of a pattern of racketeering activity that could lead to a Rico charge based on predicates of influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the Guardian has previously reported.Among the election law charges that prosecutors have been examining: criminal solicitation to commit election fraud through seeking a public or political officer to fail to perform duties and seeking to destroy, deface or delay the delivery of ballots; and conspiracy to commit election fraud.The prosecutors have also developed evidence for the previously unreported state election law charges of intentional interference with performance of election duties, the people said, as well as general criminal solicitation, which is not part of the Georgia election law statutes.In anticipation of charges against Donald Trump and his allies related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, local law enforcement last week started to increase security around the building that contains the Fulton county district attorney’s office and Georgia superior court, closing off roads and installing temporary barricades.The district attorney, Fani Willis, had instructed most of her staff to work remotely through the first weeks of August as a safety precaution, and the public area inside the building for days has been taken over by deputies from the Fulton county sheriff’s office.Good morning, US politics blog readers. The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia is expected to seek multiple charges against more than a dozen defendants, including the former president, this week.The timeline for when the district attorney, Fani Willis, would present evidence to a grand jury came into sharper relief over the weekend after prosecutors summoned the former Georgia lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, and reporter George Chidi to testify on Tuesday.The presentation is expected to take two days, to a grand jury that meets Mondays and Tuesdays. In Georgia, it is typical for prosecutors to ask a grand jury to return indictments the same day. The notifications are the clearest indication that the prosecutors intend to charge the former president this week.Prosecutors have identified roughly seven statutes of the Georgia state criminal code – including a racketeering charge, election law crimes as well as other non-election law crimes – with which to charge more than a dozen defendants in a sprawling indictment, the Guardian reported today, citing sources.Here’s what else we’re watching today:
      10.30am Eastern time: President Joe Biden will depart Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, for the White House.
      1pm: Biden and vice president Kamala Harris will have lunch.
      3pm. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief the press.
      The House and Senate are out. More

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      Hunter Biden’s attorney says special counsel has ‘no new evidence’ at hand

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      After five years, the US attorney pursuing Hunter Biden has only been able to file tax and unlawful gun possession charges – and that shouldn’t change just because the prosecutor has been named special counsel in the case, the lawyer for the president’s son has said.“If anything changes from his conclusion … the question [that] should be asked [is] what infected the process that was not the facts and the law?” Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. Lowell also said: “There’s no new evidence to be found.“Only thing that will change is the scrutiny on some of the charges.”Lowell’s remarks came after the US attorney in Delaware who has been investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings, David Weiss, received an appointment on Thursday to become special counsel over the case.The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, has said Weiss told him days earlier that “in his judgment, his investigation [had] reached a stage at which he should continue his work as a special counsel, and he asked to be appointed”. Garland added that he granted the request of Weiss – who was appointed to his post by Joe Biden’s presidential successor Donald Trump – having concluded that it was “in the public interest” to do so.Yet Garland’s justification did little to dampen a political firestorm in Washington DC. Weiss’s probe into Biden’s son is set to continue on a track that is parallel to special counsel investigations into Trump – the Republican frontrunner to challenge Biden in the 2024 race for the White House – which have produced a multitude of criminal charges against him.The Democratic incumbent, too, is under a special counsel investigation over his retention of government secrets after he finished his vice-presidency to Barack Obama in 2017.But in speaking to Face the Nation host, Margaret Brennan, on Sunday, Lowell sought to pour cold water on the notion that Weiss’s appointment represented a significant upping of the ante against his client.“He’s the same person he’s been for the last five years,” Lowell said of Weiss.Hunter Biden – who has been a lobbyist, lawyer, banker, consultant and artist – has been charged with two misdemeanors for failing to pay taxes on more than $1.5m in income in 2017 and 2018. The 53-year-old has since paid up, but he is also charged with illicitly owning a firearm while addicted to and using a controlled substance amid a broader struggle with addiction.One of Delaware’s federal judges in July was reviewing a proposed plea deal offered to Hunter Biden for him to avoid the gun charge, which is a felony. But during that review, he pleaded not guilty to the tax charges, causing the unexpected collapse of the plea deal.Lowell said on Sunday that his side and prosecutors remained at an “impasse” over negotiations to revive the plea deal, meaning Hunter Biden could go to trial. But a trial is “not inevitable”, he said. “We were trying to avoid one all along, and so were the prosecutors.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe lawyer for Hunter Biden also made it a point to say that Weiss has “already looked at” whether his client’s seat on the governing board of a Ukrainian energy company violated a federal law requiring agents of foreign states to register as such. That board seat has been a source of constant criticism from the American political right wing.“Our client has been investigated in … a long, thorough, painstaking investigation for every transaction that he was involved in,” Lowell said. “I can assure you that the only charges that made sense were two misdemeanors for failing to file, like millions of Americans do, and a … gun charge.”Special counsels such as Weiss are appointed in cases in which the attorney general believes the US justice department faces a conflict of interest. They report to the attorney general but are independent.In his own interview on Sunday on CNN, New York Democratic congressman Daniel Goldman said the reactions to the various special counsel investigations revealed a key difference between his party and the Republicans, many of whom assert that Trump is being unjustly persecuted because of his lead in the race for the GOP’s 2024 White House nomination.Those assertions persist despite detailed charges that he schemed to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election, took measures to conceal hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, and illicitly hoarded government secrets at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after his presidency. Trump has pleaded not guilty and denies all wrongdoing.Goldman, for his part, said: “If Hunter Biden has committed crimes, he should be charged with them. I’m a Democrat saying that. You don’t hear [Republicans] saying that if Donald Trump committed crimes, he should be charged with them. And that’s a critical distinction that the public needs to understand.”Hunter Biden is the president’s only surviving son after the former Delaware attorney general Beau Biden died at the age of 46 in 2015. His father and Trump are both historically unpopular with voters, according to recent polls. More

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      in US Politics

      Biden choice of economic adviser shows focus on education ahead of 2024 bid

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      Joe Biden is tapping C Kirabo Jackson, a labor economist whose research advocates robust public spending on schools, to fill out the president’s three-member Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), according to a White House official.The selection suggests public education will be a key area of focus for Biden’s brain-trust ahead of a 2024 re-election bid expected to turn on the strength of the economy. The position does not require Senate confirmation.Jackson, who will take a leave from Northwestern University, where the professor focused on economics, education and public policy, is best known for research on what draws good teachers to certain schools as well as other data showing that raising school spending increases students’ future wages.The US unemployment rate is at 3.5%, and the economy grew at a 2.4% rate last quarter. Meanwhile, consumer prices are rising at a 3.2% annual clip.While the Biden administration sees those numbers as a positive sign of a move to steadier momentum with slower growth and inflation, voters are largely dissatisfied with Biden’s handling of the economy, creating a challenge for his economic policymakers.Biden has argued that more US government investment in early childhood education programs like preschool for three- and four-year-olds would lift wages and decrease poverty, views that agree with some of Jackson’s own research.But the president’s efforts to dramatically increase such funding have consistently failed to win sufficient support in Congress.Jackson’s pick also comes as the Biden administration is thinking through how to boost lagging educational performance since the Covid-19 pandemic.Lengthy public school closures, staffing shortages and other issues during the pandemic are believed to have contributed to the sharp declines registered in US children’s reading and mathematics test scores since 2020.Cecilia Rouse, the Princeton University economist who used to be Biden’s CEA chair, said Jackson’s work would be critical given the country’s biggest long-term economic challenges, including an ageing workforce, declining fertility rates, a lack of childcare and learning loss.“Coming out of this pandemic, one of the big consequences that we will be addressing for some time is the learning loss,” she said. The choice of Jackson “may signal that the administration is looking for creative ways to address what can be a huge loss in human capital for this country for quite some time”. More

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      Republicans grumble that Hunter Biden special counsel is too little, too late

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      The decision by the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, to appoint a special counsel in the investigation of Hunter Biden has rankled some of the same congressional Republicans who have demanded more scrutiny of the president’s son.Republicans might have celebrated Garland’s announcement as a vindication of their dogged efforts to uncover wrongdoing in Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings, which have become a central focus of their investigative work since regaining control of the House of Representatives in January. Instead, Republicans voiced doubt that the special counsel appointment would result in a fair investigation, and they took the opportunity to repeat their unfounded claims about Joe Biden’s allegedly corrupt financial activities with his son.Garland announced that he was naming David Weiss, the US attorney in Delaware who has overseen the investigation of Hunter Biden for roughly four years, as special counsel, due to “the extraordinary circumstances relating to this matter”. The news comes as a previously agreed upon plea deal negotiated between prosecutors and Hunter Biden’s lawyers appears to have fallen apart, after the judge overseeing the case expressed concern over its parameters.“Today’s announcement affords the prosecutors, agents, and analysts working on this matter the ability to proceed with their work expeditiously, and to make decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law,” Garland said.Republicans generally scoffed at Garland’s reassurance. They pointed to Hunter Biden’s “sweetheart” plea deal as evidence that the Department of Justice cannot be trusted to handle the case, even though legal experts have noted the tax and gun charges initially brought against the president’s son are rarely prosecuted.Donald Trump, who has been indicted three times this year and faces dozens of criminal charges, has repeatedly cited Hunter Biden’s plea deal as an example of a double standard in law enforcement, and his presidential campaign was quick to release a statement on the announcement.A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign claimed the Bidens “have been protected by the justice department for decades” and that they “should face the required consequences”. A Trump-aligned Super Pac released a statement casting doubt upon Weiss’s ability to adequately conduct the investigation, even though Trump appointed Weiss to his post.The congresswoman Lauren Boebert, a far-right Republican from Colorado, expressed similar skepticism over Weiss’s impartiality. “Given how Hunter has been treated this far, pardon me if I’m not extremely excited that anything will actually come of this,” she wrote on Twitter, which is now known as X.Republicans pointed to the timing of Weiss’s appointment as another knock against the justice department, arguing that Garland should have named a special counsel far earlier. Weiss said last month he had never asked to be named as a special counsel in the case, contradicting a whistleblower’s claims otherwise. In his announcement, Garland said Weiss requested a special counsel designation earlier this week so he could continue his investigation into Hunter Biden.“A year too late,” Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican of North Carolina, said of Garland’s announcement.House Republican leaders also emphasized that the special counsel appointment must not interfere with their own inquiries into Hunter Biden and his business dealings, which now span across multiple committees.“This action by Biden’s DoJ cannot be used to obstruct congressional investigations or whitewash the Biden family corruption,” House Republican speaker Kevin McCarthy said on Twitter. “House Republicans will continue to pursue the facts for the American people.”Congressman James Comer, the Republican chair of the House oversight committee, described the special counsel appointment as “part of the justice department’s efforts to attempt a Biden family cover-up in light of the committee’s mounting evidence of President Joe Biden’s role in his family’s schemes selling ‘the brand’ for millions of dollars to foreign nationals”.In reality, House Republicans have so far presented no direct evidence that Joe Biden profited from Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings. Hunter Biden’s business associate, Devon Archer, told the committee last week that he was not aware of any wrongdoing on the part of Joe Biden.Despite that, Comer pledged his committee “will continue to follow the Biden family’s money trail” and “hold bad actors accountable for weaponizing law enforcement powers”.As Republicans prepared to ramp up their investigations, Democrats remained largely silent about the special counsel announcement. Democratic lawmakers appeared to greet the earlier news of Hunter Biden’s plea agreement with quiet relief, perhaps eager to put the matter behind them before the 2024 elections.But Weiss’s appointment as special counsel guarantees Hunter Biden will remain under investigation and in the headlines for a while longer, a reality that could complicate his father’s hopes of winning a second presidential term next year. More

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      in US Politics

      Merrick Garland appoints special counsel in Hunter Biden investigation

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      The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, sent shockwaves through American politics on Friday when he announced the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden, the president’s son, ahead of the 2024 election.Garland named David Weiss, the US attorney in Delaware who has been investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings, as special counsel.In remarks to reporters in Washington, Garland said Weiss told him on Tuesday that “in his judgment, his investigation has reached a stage at which he should continue his work as a special counsel, and he asked to be appointed.“Upon considering his request, as well as the extraordinary circumstances relating to this matter, I have concluded it is in the public interest to appoint him as special counsel.”It was a momentous move from the usually cautious attorney general. Special counsel investigations of Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner to face Joe Biden in next year’s election, are ongoing, having produced multiple criminal charges and the prospect of trials in an election year.Special counsels are appointed in cases in which the attorney general believes the justice department faces a conflict of interest. Special counsels report to the attorney general but operate with independence.In the investigations of Trump, the special counsel Jack Smith has overseen indictments regarding the former president’s retention of classified information and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.Another special counsel, Robert Hur, is investigating the retention of classified information by Biden after he left the vice-presidency in 2017. It was widely reported on Friday that negotiations are active about terms for a Biden interview.Hunter Biden, 53, is the president’s surviving son, after the former Delaware attorney general Beau Biden died in 2015, aged 46. Hunter Biden has been a lobbyist, lawyer, banker, consultant and artist. He has admitted to struggling with substance addiction.He is accused of failing to pay taxes on more than $1.5m in income in 2017 and 2018. He is also charged with unlawfully owning a firearm while addicted to and using a controlled substance.Last month, after a federal judge in Delaware said she needed more time to review a proposed deal to avoid the felony gun charge, Biden pleaded not guilty to the tax charges. The collapse of the plea deal was unexpected.On Friday, Weiss, who was appointed US attorney by Trump, said in a court filing plea deal negotiations were at an impasse and a trial was in order.Republicans in Congress are pursuing their own investigations of Hunter Biden’s business dealings, including in Ukraine and China, as part of a longstanding effort to generate political headaches for his father. They have so far turned up little of substance.In New Mexico on Thursday, Joe Biden generated headlines when he reacted testily to a Fox News reporter who asked about his son’s business dealings and whether Hunter ever put his powerful father on speakerphone when dealing with clients.“I never talked business with anybody,” the president said. “I knew you’d have a lousy question … because it’s not true.”Republicans have long claimed Weiss was being blocked from becoming a special counsel in the matter of Hunter Biden, a claim Weiss and the US justice department denied. On Friday, with Weiss appointed as a special counsel, Republicans still reacted with public displays of anger.In a statement, Republicans on the House oversight committee, which has been piloting congressional investigations of Hunter Biden and pushing for impeachment proceedings against his father, claimed the appointment of Weiss was “part of the DoJ’s efforts to attempt a Biden family cover-up in light of our committee’s mounting evidence of President Joe Biden’s role in his family’s schemes selling ‘the brand’ for millions of dollars to foreign nationals”.A Democrat on the committee, Jared Moskowitz of Florida, said such a reaction to getting what Republicans wanted showed the oversight chair, James Comer of Kentucky, had “no credibility” on the matter.But Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House speaker, also had complaints.“This action by Biden’s DoJ cannot be used to obstruct congressional investigations or whitewash the Biden family corruption,” McCarthy said. “If Weiss negotiated the sweetheart deal that couldn’t get approved, how can he be trusted as a special counsel?”Aaron Fritschner, a staffer for the Virginia Democratic congressman Don Beyer, noted the theatricality of such Republican anger: “Half of the House Republican conference wrote to Merrick Garland last year asking him to appoint a special counsel in the Hunter Biden case. Now that he’s done it they are acting mad.”Liz Harrington, a Trump spokesperson, said: “Crooked Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and the entire Biden crime family have been protected by the justice department for decades even though there is overwhelming evidence and credible testimony detailing their wrongdoing of lying to the American people and selling out the country to foreign enemies … for financial gain.”Trump leads Republican primary polling by vast margins despite facing 78 criminal charges regarding hush-money payments to a porn star, retention of classified records and attempted election subversion. Further charges relating to election subversion are expected in Georgia next week.Polling shows both Biden and Trump to be historically unpopular with the voting public.Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      in US Politics

      Hunter Biden: the moments that pushed president’s son into spotlight

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      Hunter Biden, the president’s son, has been at the center of a years-long investigation into his tax affairs that was set to close with a guilty plea earlier this month. But that plea deal fell apart at a Delaware courthouse after the Trump-appointed judge said she could not agree to the agreement, which ensured Biden would avoid jail time in a separate case of illegally possessing a gun while using drugs.Amid the controversy, the president has repeatedly said he supports his son, and Hunter has been seen regularly at family events. Asked if President Biden would pardon his son in the event of any conviction, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters: “No.”But the younger Biden has been embroiled in a list of unrelated controversies for years, including his overseas dealings and struggles with addiction, which ex-President Trump and his allies have regularly sought to use as fodder for attacks.Here’s a comprehensive timeline of the moments that have propelled Hunter Biden into the limelight.Joe Biden Senate tenure: Hunter Biden’s consulting work for MBNA Corporation, a large Delaware-based banking chain, sparks backlash as his father, then a senator, was pushing for legislation favored by the online banking industry. The Obama-Biden 2008 campaign later rebuffs claims of improper action.Vice-presidency: Hunter Biden joins the board of Burisma, a private Ukrainian energy company, in 2014. Years later, House Republicans and Donald Trump spread baseless claims of wrongdoing by the Biden family, including that the vice-president helped push out the Ukrainian prosecutor general for failing to crack down on corruption in 2016 in order to protect his son.Administration officials say at the time there was no conflict of interest since the president’s son was a private citizen. Hunter Biden later says it was “poor judgment” to take the paid post but insists he did nothing wrong.October 2014: The Wall Street Journal reports Hunter Biden was discharged from the US Navy Reserve in 2013 after a test returned positive for cocaine.2016: After his brother Beau Biden’s death in 2015, Hunter Biden increasingly struggles with addiction, according to his memoir, released in 2021. He begins an affair with his late brother’s wife, Hallie Biden, afterwards. His wife, Kathleen Buhle, files for divorce in December, saying her husband spent extravagantly on alcohol and on gifts for other women.2018: Federal prosecutors reportedly launch an investigation into Hunter Biden’s finances, including his tax affairs and business dealings in China, as early as 2018. Hunter Biden allegedly failed to pay taxes between 2017 and 2018 and separately inked deals with Chinese executives.May 2019: Hunter Biden marries Melissa Cohen, an environmental activist and film-maker from South Africa, days after meeting.August 2019: An Arkansas woman, Lunden Roberts, files a lawsuit asking Hunter Biden for child support, claiming her daughter, Navy, is his son.Trump impeachment: Trump seeks to divert attention from his impeachment inquiry towards Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China and Ukraine.2020 presidential election: Trump repeatedly attacks Joe Biden over his family’s overseas business ties.December 2020: A month after his father wins the presidential election, Hunter Biden confirms a Delaware attorney has been investigating his “tax affairs”. He says he had learned of the investigation, overseen by Trump-appointed US attorney David Weiss, from his lawyer a day before he confirmed it publicly. The investigation had been temporarily paused in the months leading up to the election.2021: Hunter Biden pays back the amount he owed in taxes. He also gets back into art. Insider later reports that the younger Biden sold one of his paintings to a Democratic donor, Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali, whom the president appointed to a commission in 2022.April 2023: An anonymous IRS whistleblower sends a letter to Congress saying the investigation into Hunter Biden’s finances was mishandled.20 June 2023: Hunter Biden is expected to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors after a federal court in Delaware announced it had reached a deal that was set to shield him from jail time over gun charges in a separate case.29 June 2023: Hunter Biden settles the lawsuit with Lunden Roberts and agrees to pay a monthly sum in child support, as well as turn over several paintings.19 July 2023: Two former agents at the IRS, including the previously anonymous whistleblower, testify at a GOP-lead House oversight hearing that DoJ officials “constantly hamstrung, limited, and marginalized” the US attorney, Weiss, in his investigation into Hunter Biden.26 July 2023: In a reversal, Hunter Biden pleads not guilty to two tax misdemeanor charges after the judge, Maryellen Noreika, says she cannot accept the deal over a disagreement between the prosecution and Biden’s legal team.The two sides settled a disagreement over whether Biden could face future charges for violating foreign lobbying laws. After a short recess, Biden’s lawyers said they agreed with the DoJ’s interpretation that he could face additional charges, subject to further investigation.But Noreika again raises a question regarding a diversion agreement – where the prosecutor agrees to dismiss charges, with conditions – that would have cleared Biden of his gun charges after two years if she found him to be compliant with the terms. Noreika said that power belonged to the DoJ, not her, and thus could not approve the deal.1 August 2023: Joe Biden says in an interview he “has seven grandchildren,” acknowledging for the first time Navy, four, the daughter of Hunter Biden and Lunden Roberts.August 2023: This is the deadline Noreika sets for the two sides to file additional briefs defending the constitutionality of the original plea deal.Republican lawmakers are separately targeting the entire Biden family. The GOP-led House oversight committee is investigating whether the family’s business dealings harm US national security, and some extreme members are calling for impeachment.August 11 2023: Merrick Garland, the attorney general, appoints special counsel David Weiss to oversee Hunter Biden case. More