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      Julianne Moore’s freckles? How Republican bans on ‘woke’ books have reached new level

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      When the actor Julianne Moore learned her children’s book, Freckleface Strawberry, a tale of a girl who learns to stop hating her freckles, had been targeted for a potential ban at all schools serving US military families, she took to Instagram, posting that it was a “great shock” to discover the story had been “banned by the Trump Administration”.Moore had seen a memo that circulated last week revealing that tens of thousands of American children studying in about 160 Pentagon schools both in the US and around the world had had all access to library books suspended for a week, while officials conducted a “compliance review” to hunt out any books “potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics”.Although whether Moore’s book would be selected for “further review” or banned entirely remains unclear, the episode brought into stark relief that the movement to ban books in the US – which has been bubbling up for several years, mostly in individual states – had reached a whole new level: the federal one.Donald Trump’s re-election, and his subsequent crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, has many campaigners fearing that the Pentagon move to scrub its libraries of anything it opposes ideologically could be the first of a series of broad attempts to eliminate any discussions of race, LGBTQ+ issues, diversity and historical education from public schools.The Trump administration has scoffed at the idea that it is banning books, and last month it instructed the Department of Education to end its investigations into the matter, referring to bans as a “hoax”. Indeed, many deny that banning books is censorship at all – a disconnect that stems not just from the historical context of book banning, but from a semantic dispute over what it means to “ban” something.In the early 20th century, books such as Ulysses by James Joyce and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck were banned due to “moral concerns”.Likewise, the red scare of the 1950s saw increased censorship of materials perceived as sympathetic to communism, while the 1980s saw attacks against books dealing with race and sexuality, such as The Color Purple by Alice Walker, which was nearly banned two years after its release in 1984 after a parent petitioned against its use in an Oakland, California, classroom.The difference today, however, is that instead of coming primarily from conservative community organizers, the book banning movement is now coming from government – school boards, local governments and now, with the Pentagon move, even the federal government, increasingly working in lockstep.The modern wave of book bans could be said to have started with a backlash against The 1619 Project, a journalistic anthology by Nikole Hannah-Jones published by the New York Times. The project aimed to reframe US history by centering the contributions of Black Americans, but conservative politicians – including Trump – claimed it taught students to “hate their own country”.View image in fullscreenIn response, Republican lawmakers moved to ban the work in schools, marking the beginning of an intensified campaign against so-called “anti-American” literature.According to PEN America, a non-profit dedicated to defending free expression in literature, more than 10,000 book bans occurred in public schools during the 2023-2024 school year. Books that address racism, gender and history were disproportionately targeted.“The whole principle of public education is that it is not supposed to be dictated by particular ideologies that aim to censor what other people can learn and access in schools,” Jonathan Friedman, the managing director for US free expression programs at PEN America, said.Rightwing politicians, however, have increasingly used book banning as a rallying cry, portraying certain books as tools of “indoctrination” – failing to note the irony that indoctrination is the process of carefully limiting ideas, like banning books.One key figure has been the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis. He has echoed Trump’s dismissal of book bans as a “hoax”, and spearheaded multiple attempts to reshape education to reflect only conservative values, including the Stop Woke Act, which restricts discussions on systemic racism, and the Parental Rights in Education Act, widely known as the “don’t say gay” law, which limits discussions of gender identity and sexuality in classrooms.Banned titles in Florida schools now include Beloved and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Normal People by Sally Rooney, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.What DeSantis and other rightwingers often say is that these efforts don’t truly constitute “bans” because they only remove books from schools, rather than totally outlawing them from being bought in the US, and therefore don’t encroach on free speech. John Chrastka, the executive director and founder of EveryLibrary, argued that this is faulty reasoning.“The private marketplace is protected by the first amendment in ways that the government is not beholden to,” he said. “The idea that because a book is still available for sale means that it’s not being banned outright is only the difference between a framework that was in place prior to the 1950s” and today.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe noted that Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was first published in 1928 in Europe, was banned in the US for several years before finally getting its American publication in 1959 in what was a watershed affirmation of the right to free speech. Realizing that the first amendment prevented them from blocking the book from US bookstores, critics turned their attention to libraries instead, a grayer area in terms of constitutional protections.DeSantis and other rightwing politicians have taken the lesson: if the constitution prevents you from banning a book from being bought or sold in Florida, the next best thing is to ban it from the places most people would have the easiest access to it – schools and libraries.“It doesn’t add up,” Chrastka added, “the idea that a teenager in a state where it’s impossible for them to get to an independent bookstore because they don’t exist any more somehow has enough liberty to buy the book when the school library is blocked from having it available for them.”Another key distinction is between banning books from classroom curriculum versus removing them from school libraries – which, unlike classrooms, are historically protected spaces for free access to ideas.“What you read for a class supports the curriculum,” says Chrastka, whereas “the school library is supposed to support independent reading. One of them is required reading and the other one isn’t, but [the reading material] is meant to be available.”The landmark supreme court case Island Trees School District v Pico in 1982, when a school board in New York removed books from its libraries it deemed “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy”, established that school boards cannot restrict the availability of books in their libraries simply because they don’t like or agree with the content.Critics contend the new wave of book bans, although not yet about preventing sales at bookshops, fails to meet the intended purpose of libraries: to preserve and provide a variety of ideas and information that may not be readily or equally accessible to everyone.Now, many fear that once certain books are established as unacceptable in schools, the censorship could spread to colleges, bookstores and eventually nationwide bans. Even if that does not happen, experts say one of the most reliable ways to ensure ideas are suppressed is to dismantle the education system, making Trump’s repeatedly stated goal of eliminating the Department of Education a particular concern.“The vast majority of the budget for the Department of Education and the laws and regulations that make sure that the department is functional go to help students succeed and protect students who are otherwise vulnerable,” said Chrastka.With the education system having been chipped away at for decades with budgets cuts, low literacy rates and high dropout rates, book bans only make it weaker.“What we need in this country is for students to feel supported and to find their own identities, and reading is a core component of that,” Chrastka said. “Let’s let the kids discover themselves and discover their own path forward in the process.” More

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      Republican says he wouldn’t back unconstitutional third Trump term

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      A conservative lawmaker poured cold water on extremist Republican fantasies that Donald Trump could find a way to run for an unconstitutional third presidential term, saying he would not support that barring an amendment to the US constitution that would legalize it.Asked Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press about Trump’s boasts that he might just stay in the Oval Office after his second presidency ends in 2028, the Republican US senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma said: “No, I’m not changing the constitution, first of all, unless the American people chose to do that.”The comments from Mullin – who made it a point to invoke the maxim among some that Trump should be taken seriously though not literally – referred to a 1951 constitutional amendment that barred US presidents from serving beyond two terms.The exchange between Meet the Press host Kristen Welker and Mullin came after after Republican congressman Andy Ogles of Tennessee proposed a resolution in support of a constitutional amendment that would allow Trump to serve a third stint in the White House because his two terms were not consecutive. That would bar the other three living former presidents who served two consecutive terms from seeking the Oval Office again.Furthermore, Trump recently referred to himself as “King” – a title with no term limits – when discussing his push to halt New York’s congestion pricing policy.The US constitution expressly forbids presidents from running for a third term thanks to its 22nd amendment. That amendment was introduced after Franklin D Roosevelt served two terms after being elected in 1932 – and then was re-elected in 1940 and 1944 amid the second world war. He served as president until his death in 1945.Proposing to change that amendment – in the form Ogles suggested or otherwise – would need approval from two-thirds of both the US Senate and House, which is a margin of control that Trump’s Republican party does not have in Congress. Three-fourths of the US’s state legislatures also would need to approve the change.Republicans as of last year controlled only the legislatures and governorships of about 23 of the US’s 50 states. Democrats controlled those same levers of power in 17 states, with the rest being divided.Nonetheless, that steep math has not stopped Trump from raising the possibility of staying in office beyond his second presidential term since his victory in November’s White House election.At a White House event on Thursday, he teased: “Should I run again? You tell me.”The audience, which included elected Republican officials like US senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and Congressman John James of Michigan as well as famed golfer Tiger Woods, responded with chants of: “Four more years!”According to the Washington Post, Trump remarked that the crowd reaction to his comments would draw “controversy”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThey did indeed.On Sunday, the Democratic US House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said Trump is trying to “disorient everyday Americans” by talking about a third term and referring to himself as a monarch. Jeffries said those “outrageous” comments were “intentionally unleashing extremism”.Trump “is not a king”, Jeffries said on CNN’s State of the Union. “We will never bend the knee. Not now, not ever. And we’ll continue to point out that he’s focused on the wrong things.”As Republicans are wont to do when Trump muses on unconstitutional ideas, Mullin on Sunday insisted Trump was only joking about pursuing a third White House term.“The president is a very interesting guy that you can find extreme humor when you sit down to visit with him,” Mullin added. “At the same time, he can be deadly serious.” More

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      US supreme court temporarily blocks firing of head of federal whistleblower protection office

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      The US supreme court on Friday temporarily kept on the job the head of the federal agency that protects government whistleblowers, in its first word on the many legal fights over the agenda of Donald Trump’s second presidency.The justices said in an unsigned order that Hampton Dellinger, head of the office of special counsel, could remain in his job at least until Wednesday. That’s when a lower-court order temporarily protecting him expires.With a bare majority of five justices, the high court neither granted nor rejected the administration’s plea to immediately remove him. Instead, the court held the request in abeyance, noting that the order expires in just a few days.US district judge Amy Berman Jackson has scheduled a Wednesday hearing over whether to extend her order keeping Dellinger at his post. The justices could return to the case depending on what she decides.Conservative justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito sided with the Trump administration, doubting whether courts have the authority to restore to office someone the president has fired. Acknowledging that some presidentially appointed officials have contested their removal, Gorsuch wrote that “those officials have generally sought remedies like backpay, not injunctive relief like reinstatement”.Liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have rejected the administration’s request.The conservative-dominated court has previously taken a robust view of presidential power, including in last year’s decision that gave presidents immunity from prosecution for actions they take in office.The justice department employed sweeping language in urging the court to allow the termination of the head of an obscure federal agency with limited power. Acting solicitor general Sarah Harris wrote in court papers that the lower court had crossed “a constitutional red line” by blocking Dellinger’s firing and stopping Trump “from shaping the agenda of an executive-branch agency in the new administration’s critical first days”.The office of special counsel (OSC) is responsible for guarding the federal workforce from illegal personnel actions, such as retaliation for whistleblowing. Its leader “may be removed by the president only for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office”.Dellinger was appointed by Joe Biden – who ended Trump’s first presidency by winning the 2020 election – and was confirmed by the Senate to a five-year term in 2024.“I am glad to be able to continue my work as an independent government watchdog and whistleblower advocate,” Dellinger said in a statement. “I am grateful to the judges and justices who have concluded that I should be allowed to remain on the job while the courts decide whether my office can retain a measure of independence from direct partisan and political control.”Harris said the court should use this case to lay down a marker and check federal judges who “in the last few weeks alone have halted dozens of presidential actions (or even perceived actions)” that encroached on Trump’s presidential powers.The court already has pared back a 1935 ruling, known as Humphrey’s Executor, that protected presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed leaders of independent agencies from arbitrary firings.Conservative justices have called into question limits on the president’s ability to remove the agency heads. In 2020, for instance, the court by a 5-4 vote upheld Trump’s first-term firing of the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).Chief justice John Roberts wrote for the court that “the President’s removal power is the rule, not the exception”. But in that same opinion, Roberts drew distinctions that suggested the court could take a different view of efforts to remove the whistleblower watchdog. “In any event, the OSC exercises only limited jurisdiction to enforce certain rules governing Federal Government employers and employees. It does not bind private parties at all or wield regulatory authority comparable to the CFPB,” Roberts wrote.The new administration already has indicated it would seek to entirely overturn the Humphrey’s Executor decision, which held that Franklin D Roosevelt could not arbitrarily fire a Federal Trade Commission member during his presidency. Trump has taken aim at people who are on the multimember boards that run an alphabet soup of federal agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit System Review Board.Like Dellinger, they were confirmed to specific terms in office and the federal laws under which the agencies operate protect them from arbitrary firings. Lower courts have so far blocked some of those firings. More

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      DoJ investigation into cases against Trump marked by vested interests

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      Donald Trump’s investigation into the criminal cases brought against him during the Biden administration, including the special counsel prosecutions, will be overseen by a group of justice department officials who all have vested interests that could undercut even legitimate findings of misconduct by prosecutors.The new attorney general, Pam Bondi, has taken steps in recent weeks to create the “weaponization working group” to carry out Trump’s day one executive order directing the department to review possible abuses of the criminal justice system over the past four years.Bondi’s group, according to her memo laying out its structure, will be composed of the attorney general’s office, the deputy attorney general’s office, the office of legal policy, the civil rights division and the US attorney’s office for the District of Columbia as it examines cases that angered Trump.The investigation is already politically charged because the group is tasked with sending reports to Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, an arrangement that deputizes the justice department to the White House in an unusual way.But the involvement in various adversarial litigation against the Biden administration by the lawyers leading the five offices conducting the investigation – notably into former special counsel Jack Smith’s team that indicted Trump – give rise to a tangle of possible conflicts.The problem with conflicts is that they could undercut any conclusions finding impropriety even if they are colorable claims, such as the allegation that a top prosecutor once tried to strong-arm a defense lawyer into making his client give evidence to incriminate Trump.And for all of the discussion by Trump’s allies that there should be some civil or criminal proceedings against members of the previous administration, an actual or perceived conflict of interest, could risk a judge dismissing any attempt to pursue claims in court.The justice department did not respond to a request for comment.The possible conflicts are varied: some of the justice department officials were defense lawyers in the very cases they will now be investigating, while others signed onto positions defending Trump in civil and criminal matters.Bondi and Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general nominee, pledged to consult about any potential conflicts with career attorneys. But some of those career attorneys were recently fired – and replaced in at least one instance by a lawyer who worked for Blanche when he defended Trump.Bondi’s possible conflict arises with the special counsel prosecutions, after she signed on to an amicus brief that supported Trump and urged the federal judge in Florida who oversaw the classified documents case to dismiss the charges because Smith was illegally appointed.The deputy attorney general’s office will soon to be led by Blanche and his principal deputy Emil Bove, who were the lead defense lawyers for Trump in the special counsel prosecutions as well as the New York criminal trial – meaning they faced off directly with the Biden justice department.The head of the justice department’s office of legal policy, Aaron Reitz, was formerly in Texas attorney general Ken Paxton’s office, which joined a lawsuit against the Biden administration over its controversial initiative to address violence and threats against school administrators.The head of the justice department’s civil rights division, Harmeet Dhillon, was most recently the principal at the Dhillon Law Group, which Trump and the Republican National Committee retained as counsel in various civil litigation matters.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnd, if confirmed to the role, the acting US attorney in Washington, Ed Martin, would be investigating the very prosecutors and the FBI agents he personally faced off with as a defense lawyer for multiple people charged in connection with the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.Martin has separately come under scrutiny because, after he became the acting US attorney, he dismissed a case against one of his ex-January 6 rioter clients before he had formally withdrawn from the representation.He later explained to the presiding US district judge that it was an oversight and he had simply forgotten to remove his name as the “counsel of record” when that client decided to appeal the case and retained a new lawyer.But it remains unclear whether Martin has actually withdrawn himself as the defense lawyer after the court notified him that he was not permitted to file a removal request because his membership with the DC bar – partly the jurisdiction he oversees as acting US attorney – had lapsed.The overlapping vested interests also extend past the justice department to the White House itself, the final destination for the weaponization group’s findings, according to the executive order Trump signed on his first day back in office.Miller, the deputy chief of staff for policy orchestrating the immigration crackdown, will receive the final report. Coincidentally, one of Miller’s lawyers during the investigations into Trump was John Rowley – who was also part of the Trump legal team.Also on the wider Trump legal team was Stanley Woodward, now serving as a top lawyer in the White House chief of staff’s office.Woodward was the lawyer pulled into a contentious meeting in 2022 convened by Jay Bratt, a senior prosecutor on the special counsel team who allegedly suggested Woodward’s application to be a DC superior court judge would be derailed if he did not convince his client, Trump bodyman Walt Nauta, to testify against Trump. More

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      Judge rejects DoJ call to immediately dismiss Eric Adams corruption case

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      A New York judge on Friday said he would not immediately dismiss Eric Adams’s corruption case, but ordered the Democratic New York City mayor’s trial delayed indefinitely after the justice department asked for the charges to be dismissed.In a written ruling, the US district judge Dale Ho in Manhattan said he would appoint an outside lawyer, Paul Clement of the law firm Clement & Murphy PLLC, to present arguments against the federal prosecutors’ bid to dismiss, in order to help the judge make his decision.Justice department officials in Washington asked Ho to dismiss the charges against Adams on 14 February. A hearing was held in New York earlier this week.That came about after several prosecutors resigned rather than follow orders from the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, an appointee of Donald Trump and the Republican president’s former personal criminal defense lawyer, to seek dismissal of the case brought last year by prosecutors during the Biden administration.The current justice department argued that dismissal was needed so Adams could focus on helping Trump crack down on illegal immigration. The controversy, especially because the city has a strong sanctuary law designed to stop local enforcement from assisting federal immigration enforcement, has sparked a political crisis in the most populous US city. Senior Democrats have said that dismissing the charges makes Adams beholden to Trump’s administration.Adams, 64, was charged last September with taking bribes and campaign donations from Turkish nationals seeking to influence him. Adams, running for re-election this year, has pleaded not guilty.Many have called on Adams to resign.Four of the mayor’s deputies plan to resign amid loss of confidence in the mayor. The governor of New York state, Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said on Thursday she would not use her power to remove Adams, but proposed new oversight of the mayor’s office. More

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      Trump administration can continue mass firings of federal workers, judge rules

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      The Trump administration can for now continue its mass firings of federal employees, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, rejecting a bid by a group of labor unions to halt Donald Trump’s dramatic downsizing of the roughly 2.3 million-strong federal workforce.The ruling by the US district judge Christopher Cooper in Washington DC federal court is temporary while the litigation plays out. But it is a win for the Trump administration as it seeks to purge the federal workforce and slash what it deems wasteful and fraudulent government spending.The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) and four other unions sued last week to block the administration from firing hundreds of thousands of federal workers and granting buyouts to employees who quit voluntarily.The unions are seeking to block eight agencies including the Department of Defense, Department of Health and Human Services, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Department of Veterans Affairs from implementing mass layoffs.In his 16-page order, Cooper started by acknowledging Trump’s “onslaught of executive actions that have caused, some say by design, disruption and even chaos in widespread quarters of American society”.He went on to add: “Affected citizens and their advocates have challenged many of these actions on an emergency basis in this Court and others across the country.”However, Cooper on Thursday said, he likely lacks the power to hear the case, and the unions instead must file complaints with a federal labor board that hears disputes between unions and federal agencies.Cooper wrote: “NTEU fails to establish that it is likely to succeed on the merits because this Court likely lacks subject matter jurisdiction over the claims it asserts. The Court will therefore deny the unions’ motion for a temporary restraining order and, for the same reasons, deny their request for a preliminary injunction.”Trump has tapped the Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, to lead a so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, which has swept through federal agencies slashing thousands of jobs and dismantling federal programs since Trump became president last month and put Musk in charge of rooting out what he deems wasteful spending as part of Trump’s dramatic overhaul of government. Trump also ordered federal agencies to work closely with Doge to identify federal employees who could be laid off.Termination emails were sent last week to workers across the federal government – mostly recently hired employees still on probation at agencies such as the Department of Education, the Small Business Administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the General Services Administration and others.The plaintiffs, which include the United Auto Workers, the NTEU and the National Federation of Federal Employees, said in their lawsuit that White House efforts, including through Doge, to shrink the federal workforce violate separation-of-powers principles by undermining Congress’s authority to fund federal agencies.The unions said that unless the court intervenes, they will be irreparably harmed by lost revenue from dues-paying members who were either fired or retired early to take buyouts.In a statement released last Wednesday, NTEU president Doreen Greenwald said: “We will not stand idly by while this administration takes illegal actions that will harm citizens, federal employees and the economy.”She went on to add: “All of these orders are further evidence that this administration is motivated not by efficiency, but by cruelty and a total disregard for the government services that will be lost.”Most civil service employees can be fired legally only for bad performance or misconduct, and they have a host of due process and appeal rights if they are let go arbitrarily. The probationary employees primarily targeted in last week’s wave have fewer legal protections.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA judge overseeing a similar case in Boston federal court allowed the buyouts to move forward in a ruling on 12 February, finding labor unions that filed the case did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit because they had not shown how they would be harmed by the plan.The window to accept buyouts has now closed, and about 75,000 workers took up the administration’s offer, according to the US office of personnel management. That represents about 3% of the total federal workforce.The unions are asking the judge to declare the firings and buyouts illegal and block the government from firing more employees or offering another round of buyouts.In a Monday court filing, the government said the unions did not have a right to sue because they would not be harmed by the firings and buyouts. Granting the unions’ request would also inappropriately interfere with the president’s efforts to streamline the federal workforce, the government argued.More than 70 lawsuits have been filed seeking to block Trump’s efforts to remake the federal workforce, clamp down on immigration and roll back transgender rights.The results have so far been mixed, but judges have blocked some aspects of Trump’s marquee policies, including his bid to end automatic birthright citizenship to children born in the US.On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that the Internal Revenue Service had began firing employees as part of the widespread layoffs.Speaking to the outlet, a person familiar with the decision said that approximately 7,000 employees were expected to lose their jobs, marking 7% of a 100,000-person agency.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      US Senate narrowly confirms Kash Patel as next FBI director

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      The US Senate has confirmed Kash Patel as the next FBI director, handing oversight of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency to an official who has declined to explicitly say whether he would use his position to pursue Donald Trump’s political opponents.Patel was narrowly confirmed on Thursday in a 51-49 vote, a reflection of the polarizing nature of his nomination and what Democrats see as his unwillingness to keep the bureau independent from partisan politics or resist politically charged requests from the president.Notably, at his confirmation hearing, Patel refused to commit that he would not use his position to investigate officials he portrayed as Trump’s adversaries in his book, and affirmed that he believed the FBI was answerable to the justice department and, ultimately, the White House.Patel’s responses suggest that his arrival at FBI headquarters will usher in a new chapter for the bureau as a result of his adherence to Trump’s vision of a unitary executive, where the president directs every agency, and willingness to prioritize the administration’s policy agenda.That objective to implement the Trump administration’s mandate has already taken hold at the justice department, which oversees the bureau and last week forced through the dismissal of corruption charges against Eric Adams, the New York mayor, in order to get his help to deport undocumented immigrants.The greatest challenge for recent FBI directors has been the delicate balance of retaining Trump’s confidence while resisting pressure to make public pronouncements or open criminal investigations that are politically motivated or that personally benefit the president.Patel is unlikely to have difficulties, such is his ideological alignment with Trump on a range of issues including the need to pursue retribution against any perceived enemies like former special counsel Jack Smith and others who investigated him during his first term.The new leadership at the FBI also comes as questions about the far-reaching nature of his loyalty to Trump remain unresolved. At his confirmation hearing, Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee tried in vain to elicit answers about his role as a witness in the criminal investigation into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents.During the investigation, Patel was subpoenaed to testify about whether the documents the FBI seized at Mar-a-Lago had been declassified under a “standing declassification order”, as he had represented in various public comments at the time.The Guardian reported at the time that Patel initially declined to appear, citing his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination. He later testified after the chief US district judge in Washington authorized Patel to have limited immunity from prosecution, which forced his testimony.That loyalty, to resist federal prosecutors, endeared him to Trump and is understood to have played a factor in him ultimately getting tapped for the FBI director position after Trump struggled for weeks to decide who he wanted at the bureau, a person familiar with the matter said.Patel ultimately clarified, in something of a partial admission under close questioning from senator Cory Booker, that although he witnessed Trump issue a declassification order for some documents, he did not actually know whether they applied to the documents found at Mar-a-Lago.Democrats have unanimously considered Patel’s track record in the first Trump administration, his incendiary remarks criticizing the bureau he was nominated to lead and more generally his role in the classified documents case to be disqualifying.When Trump tapped Patel last year, Democrats largely believed it would lead to a backlash that would sink his nomination. No resistance ever materialized, in part because Patel was less controversial than some of Trump’s other nominees, such as Pete Hegseth for defense secretary.Patel was formerly a public defender in Florida before joining the justice department in 2014 as a line prosecutor in the national security division.In 2017, Patel became a top Republican aide on the House intelligence committee, where he authored a politically charged memo accusing the FBI and the justice department of abusing surveillance powers to spy on a Trump adviser. The memo was criticized as misleading, though an inspector general later found errors with aspects of the surveillance.His efforts impressed Trump, who brought him into the administration and quickly elevated him to national security and defense roles. By the end of Trump’s first term, he was the chief of staff to defense secretary Chris Miller and briefly considered for CIA director.While John Durham, the special counsel appointed by Trump, found a catalog of mistakes by prosecutors in the Russia investigation, he found no evidence that officials had been motivated by political animus and brought no charges – contrary to claims by Trump and Patel. More

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      The little-known Gullah Geechee politician who pushed for the 14th amendment

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      After Donald Trump issued an executive order to limit birthright citizenship last month, Marilyn Hemingway, the CEO and president of the Gullah Geechee Chamber of Commerce, knew she had to do something. Based in Georgetown, South Carolina, the GGCC helps preserve the history of Gullah Geechee people, the Africans who were enslaved on the Sea Islands along the Atlantic coast, and their descendants. One such person was Joseph Hayne Rainey, a man born in Georgetown and enslaved until his father purchased his freedom when he was 10. Rainey is who Hemingway immediately thought of following Trump’s order.Rainey was the first Black person elected to the United States congress, where he was known for his support of the 14th amendment, which was ratified in 1868 and stated: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The amendment was necessary to give the roughly 4.5 million Black people in the country citizenship after emancipation, as a previous supreme court case, Dred Scott v Sandford, had denied citizenship to all people of African descent.Rainey’s support for the laws passed during Reconstruction was deeply informed by his life in enslavement. He spent much of his time in Congress fighting to protect Black Americans and to ensure the 14th and 15th amendments – the latter of which prohibited the federal government from denying a citizen the right to vote based on race, color or previous condition of servitude – were enforced.“The 14th amendment was passed and ratified because once those who were enslaved were emancipated, it was like they didn’t have standing,” Hemingway said. “Where were they in this world now? They were no longer enslaved, so they needed to be made citizens … [Rainey] went from an enslaved person to an emancipated person to a citizen. His personal story reflects the American story.”Now, the amendment that has long granted birthright citizenship is being used by the US president to deny citizenship to the children of recent immigrants. “The Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States,” his EO reads. It “has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’”.Trump’s executive order almost immediately faced several lawsuits from civil rights groups and Democratic attorneys generals, as well as a temporary restraining order from a federal judge. A federal appeals court has denied the administration’s request to reinstate a ban, but the threat still looms, especially as the president has said he expects the supreme court to side with him on the decision.“The first line of the 14th amendment is designed to say that anyone who was born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction of the United States is a citizen,” said Jamal Greene, a professor at Columbia Law School. “That doesn’t depend on their race or their ethnicity or anything else about them. The only question is whether they’re subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.”Trump’s administration has harped on the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States”, which was understood to refer to people who were not subject to US law, Greene said. That would have meant diplomats from other countries, Indigenous people, who are sovereign, and, potentially, an invading army. But now Trump is trying to use that language to apply to a wide group of people, including children whose parents were not lawfully in the US at the time of their birth.Greene said that those who support such an understanding of the law are suggesting that those people would not have an allegiance to the US. “But that interpretation is not consistent with how it would have been originally understood,” he said. “And it’s also not consistent with the language itself, since jurisdiction is not a reference to allegiance. It’s a reference to whether US laws apply to those people.”Some are also concerned about the order’s potential reach to citizens, such as Black Americans. The GGCC, for its part, argues that Trump’s order is an attempt to undo some of Rainey’s work. For Rainey, the 14th amendment was not just for Black Americans – it was for everyone. “To all people born unnaturalized into the United States, [the 14th amendment] is the first time in the history of the United States that it actually covered citizenship, including of formerly enslaved people,” Hemingway said. “They were the impetus for this, but it covered everyone. So we have to be very careful when we come and we start attacking it, because it’s not just going to remove citizenship of immigrants, it’s going to remove citizenship of everyone.”Though the restraining order blocks Trump’s plan, the future of birthright citizenship will be undecided until the supreme court hears the case. In the meantime, Hemingway is continuing to promote Rainey’s life and continue his fight.“This is why we speak out to make sure correct history is told … We still have to have the same fight for civil rights. [Rainey’s] actions inform our actions to this day. His story needs to be told more so that we could hold all of our elected officials accountable to the United States constitution. We are in a constitutional crisis. His life explains why we continue the fight.” More