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      US prison labor is cruel and pointless legalized slavery. I know first-hand | Dyjuan Tatro

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      Almost immediately after I was sent to prison, I was assigned to a “program”, the term American prison officials use for a job. I was to sweep the prison hallways, alongside roughly 30 other men. Together we pushed brooms across gray corridors hour after hour, day after day.No matter how many hours I worked, I couldn’t afford toilet paper, soap or toothpaste. We had to pay for basic hygiene products at exploitative markups, way more than they cost in free society, and I was paid 10 cents an hour. To survive in prison, even with a full-time job, I was forced to rely on family, who struggled to support me financially.There’s a misleading narrative pushed by officials about prison labor, one that falsely frames prison jobs as rehabilitative. Nothing could be further from the truth.In prison, my work was meaningless and dehumanizing. It conveyed no new skills, taught me no life lessons and earned me next to nothing. It did not build my résumé, prepare me to navigate workplace relationships or teach me how to budget. It served only to devalue my labor and person. Prisons are about punishment, not rehabilitation.I had no choice in whether I went to work or not – and there were no sick days. If I didn’t go, I would be locked in my cell for 23 hours a day. And as little as it was, I needed the pay.About halfway through my sentence, I had the chance to apply to the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), one of the most renowned and rigorous college-in-prison programs in the US. The opportunity changed the trajectory of my life. Graduating from Bard College with my bachelor’s degree gave me something that no one could take away: an education. It was a hard-won prize, especially given the system’s intent to let me languish.Sitting in those classrooms better prepared me for work outside. Engaging with other students prepared me to later engage with co-workers; interacting with professors prepared me to deal with supervisors. Alongside classes in philosophy, political economy and differential equations, I was learning valuable social and professional skills that were radically at odds with the reality of prison.It costs New York around $70,000 a year in taxpayer money to imprison someone. It costs the BPI about $10,000 a year to educate an incarcerated student. New York’s recidivism rate is 40%, while graduates of the BPI and similar programs recidivate at only 4%, a tenfold decrease. Yet, despite its clear positive record, only 300 of New York’s 30,000 incarcerated people are enrolled at the BPI in any given semester. I was one of a lucky few.Prisons are designed to warehouse, traumatize and exploit people, then send them back home in worse shape than when they entered the system. Despite having worked every day, the vast majority of people are released with no job experience, no references and no hope. Some would take this to mean that the system is failing. And it is with regard to public safety, rehabilitation and justice, but it’s horrifyingly successful at two things: guaranteeing jobs for some and perpetuating slavery for others.Over the years, I learned that prison officials were not interested in giving us fruitful educational and job opportunities that allowed us to go home and stay home. The reality is much more sinister. Prisons are a job program for officers that requires us to keep coming back.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionYou may be familiar with company towns and coal towns; in the US, we have prison towns, too. In New York, all state prisons were built upstate as economic stimuli in rural districts and failing farm communities. The facilities imprison predominantly Black and brown inner-city residents who toil under a class of white overseers. I remember a guard bending over to shackle me one day and saying, “I just want to thank you for being here because I’m too old to be digging ditches.” My body and my labor made him an easy living. The parallels to slavery are stark and visceral.Prison officials ignore these critiques and justify their practices by pointing to the exception in the 13th amendment of the US constitution – negotiated as a concession to slave states – that allows slavery “as a punishment for crime”. This exception enables states like Texas to force incarcerated people, mostly Black men, to pick cotton – even at a net loss to the state, because cruelty is the point.Thankfully, a new abolition movement is working to end this exception, and I hope for its success. Over the past few years, seven states – from Tennessee and Alabama to Oregon and Vermont – have voted to end the exception in their state constitutions. And earlier this year, just ahead of Juneteenth, Senators Jeff Merkley and Cory Booker and Congresswoman Nikema Williams introduced the abolition amendment in Congress to end the exception in the US constitution and outlaw the enslavement of incarcerated people. Today it has bipartisan support.After 12 years, I was released with $40 and a bus ticket. The state did not even give me an ID. But I was one of the lucky ones who went home with a college degree. Without it, I would probably be back in prison today. I understand the value of giving incarcerated people real opportunities. Enslaving people is diametrically opposed to it. Nothing good can come from it.
      Dyjuan Tatro is the senior government affairs officer at the Bard Prison Initiative, where he focuses on expanding college access for incarcerated people, and an #EndTheException ambassador More

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      ‘You want to think America is better’: can the supreme court be saved?

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      When Dawn Porter studied law at Georgetown University in Washington, she would pass the US supreme court every day. “You walk by the marble columns, the frontage which has inspirational words, and you believe that,” she recalls. “You think because of this court Black people integrated schools, because of this court women have the right to choose, because of this court, because of this court, because of this court.”Its profound role in American life is chronicled in Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court, Porter’s four-part documentary series that traces the people, decisions and confirmation battles that have helped the court’s relationship with politics turn from a respectful dance into a toxic marriage.Porter, 57, an Emmy award winner who maintains her bar licence, remembers first year common law classes when she studied the court’s landmark decisions. “Like most lawyers I have a great admiration for not only what the court can do but its role in shaping American opinion as well as American society,” she says via Zoom from New York, a poster for her film John Lewis: Good Trouble behind her.“If there’s a criticism of the court in this series, it comes from a place of longing, a place of saying we can’t afford for this court to lose the respect of the American people. There’s going to be decisions over time that people disagree with. That’s not unusual. What’s unusual is how cases are getting to the court, how they’re ignoring precedent and the procedures by which the decisions are getting made. That’s where I would love people to focus.”Deadlocked offers a visual montage of the court winding back in time: women and people of colour gradually disappear in favour of an all-white, all-male bench. They include Chief Justice Earl Warren, who heralded an era of progressive legal decisions such as Brown v Board of Education, a unanimous 1954 ruling that desegregated public schools.Porter says of the paradox: “One of the things we were thinking is, isn’t it ironic that this all-male, all-white court is responsible for Brown v Board and for Roe v Wade [which enshrined the right to abortion] and you have the right to an attorney, which is Gideon v Wainwright, and you have the right to have your rights read to you. Yet when we have the most diverse court we’ve ever had, we’re seeing a rollback of some of these civil rights.”In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson nominated the civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall to be the first Black man to serve on the court. A group of southern senators, almost all Democrats, sought to exploit riots in the major cities and fears about crime to try to derail his nomination. Marshall endured five days of questioning spanning three weeks and was finally confirmed by the Senate in a 69-11 vote.There have only been two African American justices since: conservative Clarence Thomas and liberal Ketanji Brown Jackson. The first woman to sit on the court was Sandra Day O’Connor, a moderate conservative appointed by the Republican president Ronald Reagan.“It takes a century of supreme court jurisprudence before we get a woman on the court. There’s an irony there that we have the current composition of the court and yet we have probably one of the most least hospitable courts to individual rights.”The court’s relationship with public opinion has been complex, leading at some times, following at others. In 2015, it ruled that same-sex couples had the right to marry. The 5-4 decision removed same-sex marriage bans in 14 states – an acknowledgment of shifting attitudes and the rise of the LGBTQ+ rights movement.Porter observes: “The court doesn’t have an army. It doesn’t even have PR or a media representative. The supreme court can’t change public opinion but what the court can do is either set an aspirational goal or it can reflect where the country is. For the gay marriage decision, that’s where the country was. The country was supportive of same-sex marriage and the court ratifies that public opinion and makes it law.”Opinion polls show that a majority of Americans have also consistently supported reproductive rights. In Roe v Wade in 1973, the court voted 7-2 that the constitution protects individual privacy, including the right to abortion. Porter observes: “It’s not that controversial a decision by that time. More than half the states had reproductive rights access so it was only going to affect some of the states.”At the time, Christian evangelicals were not opposed to abortion rights. “Evangelicals historically were pro-choice. This is where politics comes in and is on this collision course with the judiciary. Evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell realised, oh, wait, abortion is a wedge issue and there are all these Catholic voters. So they come together.“What the evangelicals want is tax exemption for religious schools. The Catholics don’t want abortion and together they’re a powerful voting bloc. They not only say we’re going to try and get the supreme court to change but we’re going to elect a president who is going to help us.”These religious groups duly turned against the Democratic president Jimmy Carter, an evangelical Sunday school teacher, in favour of the divorced former Hollywood actor Reagan. Porter continues: “What you see is kind of politics at work. How can we get power? How can we get what we want? How can we form alliances?“That alliance is very powerful because Reagan ends up having so many appointments to the court and you see the rightward shift of the court. These kinds of monumental changes don’t happen quickly but building blocks are constructed in these earlier years, like in the 80s, and they’ve continued to this day.”The court’s role as a political actor was never more stark than in 2000, when its ruling in Bush v Gore terminated the recount process in Florida in the presidential election, effectively handing the White House to George W Bush. Porter notes: “It’s 5-4 to step in and stop the voting to determine who would be the next president of the United States. Sandra Day O’Connor later said she regretted voting with the majority.“Also, interestingly, Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are all working with the Republicans on the side of soon-to-be President Bush. Is that illegal? No. Is it impermissible? No. Is it unethical? No. Is it interesting? Yes!” Porter says with a laugh.But the ever-growing politicisation of the court became turbocharged – perhaps irreversibly – by the death of the conservative justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. Mitch McConnell, then Republican majority leader in the Senate, committed a professional foul by refusing to act on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to replace him, insisting that the seat remain vacant in an election year.Step forward Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president who released a list of 11 potential supreme court nominees based on advice from conservative groups such as the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. It was an unprecedented political masterstroke that comforted religious conservatives troubled by his unholy antics and past support for abortion rights.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMcConnell is seen in Deadlocked asserting that “the single biggest issue that brought nine out of 10 Republican voters home to Donald Trump … was the supreme court”. This clip is from an address he made in 2019 to the Federalist Society, which has played a critical role in tilting the court to the right.The group was founded in 1982 under the mentorship of Justice Antonin Scalia to challenge what conservatives perceived as liberal dominance of courts and law schools. Among its most prominent members was Leonard Leo, who oversaw the rise in its influence at the expense of the more liberal American Bar Association.Porter says: “Leonard Leo is one of the most fascinating and yet not widely known political actors in our contemporary history. The Federalist Society realises: we can have influence in grooming judges and who’s getting appointed to the lower courts. Leonard Leo takes that on steroids and eventually becomes the person who former president Trump looks to create his list of potential supreme court nominees.“In recent years Leo has secured a multibillion-dollar war chest in order to continue to groom and populate the lower courts with very conservative ideologues. Amy Coney Barrett is a product of that. Kavanaugh is a product of that. All the greatest hits are with Federalist Society influence.”Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator, has called it “the scheme”: a decades-long plot by rightwing donor interests to capture the supreme court and use it to accomplish goals that they cannot achieve through elected officials. The Federalist Society is a receptacle for “dark money” – millions of dollars in anonymous hidden spending.Porter adds: “The problem with private entities like the Federalist Society having so much influence and power is that there’s no insight into the source of their funds. We certainly do know that it’s not a coincidence that some of the interests of some of the most conservative folks seem to be being served by these appointments.”Last year the rightwing forces achieved their greatest victory with a decision that once seemed unthinkable: the overturning of Roe v Wade after nearly half a century. Most Republican-led states moved to restrict abortion with 14 banning the procedure in most cases at any point in pregnancy. About 25 million women of childbearing age now live in states where the law makes abortions harder to get than they were before the ruling.Porter had wanted to believe the court she admired as a student was a bulwark in defence of individual liberties. “Every pundit, every organisation, said Roe is going to be overturned and yet it was still hard to believe that 50 years later, when so many people rely on that decision, that it actually could be overturned.“I will say it really did personally impact my feeling about the court. Reading the decision, there’s ignoring of history. It’s not a well-written opinion, it’s not coherent, and that’s really hard. We all need to believe in things and we all need to believe that these are the smartest people and that they’re able to put aside their personal beliefs and that didn’t seem to be the case.“It was more than disappointing. It’s somewhat comforting that we have such a strong reaction to it but I see the cases of the women who have been so harmed by this decision. There are people have been forced to carry pregnancies to term that were not viable, people who just stay pregnant who didn’t want to be pregnant. You want to think America is better than that.”As the final episode of Deadlocked acknowledges, the court faces a crisis of legitimacy. A series of extremist rulings out of whack with public opinion have come at the same time as ethics scandals involving the rightwing justices Thomas and Samuel Alito. The share of Americans with a favourable opinion of the court has declined to its lowest point in public opinion surveys since 1987: 44% favourable versus 54% unfavourable, according to the Pew Research Center.Porter adds: “Every single person we spoke to for this series regardless of their political background – and we have Scalia’s former clerk, who wrote the decision broadening access to guns; we have Ted Olson, who argued Bush v Gore for President Bush; we have Don Ayer, who was a Reagan justice department official – is concerned about the reputation of the court and what the future holds if the court continues to chart its own path and not realise the delicate balance of our tripartite system of government.“What if the court sides with a Trump who refuses to accept the results of the election next year? That’s what we’re talking about and a lot of the people who did the insurrection are still out there; we didn’t arrest them all. We’re in uncharted waters. It’s not a game and I don’t think anyone wants to actually put this to the test of: will our democracy survive?”
      Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court premieres on Showtime on 22 September with a UK date to be announced More

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      Appeals court shields Trump ally Scott Perry’s phone in 2020 election inquiry

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      A federal appeals court has ruled that top House Republican Scott Perry’s text messages about efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election were constitutionally protected and off-limits to prosecutors, according to the opinion in the case that was newly unsealed on Wednesday.The three-judge panel at the US court of appeals for the DC circuit found that Perry’s communications with congressmen and staff were protected under the so-called speech or debate clause, which shields members of Congress from legal proceedings connected to their official duties.“These are quintessential legislative acts entitled to the privilege, and we vacate the district court’s judgment with respect to those communications and remand,” the appeals court ruled.It also concluded the lower court was wrong to decide that Perry’s communications only qualified for the speech or debate clause protection if the fact-finding had been authorized by an official body, like a congressional committee, saying some “informal” fact-finding would be privileged.The opinion – written by the Trump-nominated circuit judge Neomi Rao and joined by Greg Katsas, also nominated by Trump, and Karen Henderson, nominated by George HW Bush – marks a setback for the special counsel Jack Smith investigating efforts in 2020 to stop the peaceful transfer of power.Still, the appeals court determined that some information gathered by Perry during his informal fact-finding might not be protected. For messages to qualify for the privilege, the appeals court ruled, they must be “integral” or “essential” to the legislative work in question.It also rejected Perry’s categorical position that all of his messages, including to people not working in the executive or legislative branches, were privileged.“We disagree with the district court’s holding that informal fact-finding is never a legislative act. But we also reject Representative Perry’s proposition that informal fact-finding is always a legislative act,” the appeals court found.The ruling instructed the then chief US district judge Beryl Howell to reconsider her initial decision allowing prosecutors to access some of Perry’s phone, and apply their reasoning on a communication-by-communication basis for his messages with executive branch and non-congressional officials.The case now goes back to federal district court in Washington, unless prosecutors ask for an en banc rehearing of the matter before the full DC circuit. A spokesperson for the special counsel’s office declined to comment whether prosecutors would take that step.For around a year, prosecutors have sought to trawl through 2,200 messages and documents on Perry’s phone related to his involvement in Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election defeat and to stop the January 6 congressional certification of the 2020 election results.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe FBI seized Perry’s phone last August pursuant to a court-authorized warrant, even before Smith was appointed special counsel, but sought a second warrant to search through his texts and emails with members of Congress, executive branch officials and other third-parties.The interest in Perry, the chairman of the powerful and ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus and one of Trump’s most ardent supporters on Capitol Hill, came because he introduced Trump to former justice department official Jeff Clark in 2020, according to people familiar with the matter.Clark subsequently became a central player in Trump’s efforts to decertify the election results in battleground states that he lost and infamously drafted a false memo saying the justice department was investigating election fraud in Georgia when it was not.That false memo, among other things, led to prosecutors in Fulton county, Georgia, charging Clark alongside Trump and others on racketeering charges alleging that he violated state law in trying to overturn the election results. Clark has pleaded not guilty in that case.Perry was also involved in meetings with Trump at the White House in the weeks before the Capitol attack, including a strategy session with other Republican members of Congress on 21 December 2020, where they strategized ways to stop the certification from taking place. More

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      Christine Blasey Ford to release memoir detailing Kavanaugh testimony

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      Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, pitching the then conservative US supreme court nominee into huge controversy, will release a memoir next year that she sees as a call for people to speak out about wrongdoing.Publisher St Martin’s Press said Ford’s book would share “riveting new details about the lead-up” to her Senate testimony and “its overwhelming aftermath”, including receiving death threats and being unable to live in her home.The publisher also said Ford would discuss “how people unknown to her around the world restored her faith in humanity”. The book, to be called One Way Back, will be published in March.In a statement, Ford said: “I never thought of myself as a survivor, a whistleblower, or an activist before the events in 2018.“But now, what I and this book can offer is a call to all the other people who might not have chosen those roles for themselves, but who choose to do what’s right. Sometimes you don’t speak out because you are a natural disrupter. You do it to cause a ripple that might one day become a wave.”Kavanaugh, a former Republican operative, was the second of Donald Trump’s three nominees to the supreme court, tilting the court decisively in favor of conservatives and leading to rightwing rulings including the removal of the right to abortion.Ford is a professor at Palo Alto University and Stanford University School of Medicine.In September 2018, she told the Senate judiciary committee Kavanuagh sexually assaulted her at a high-school party in the 1980s.He pinned her on a bed, she said, pressing his hand over her mouth while trying to remove her clothes.In prepared testimony, Ford said: “I believed he was going to rape me. I tried to yell for help … I thought Brett was accidentally going to kill me.”Ford escaped when a friend of Kavanaugh jumped on the bed, she said, famously telling senators: “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. The uproarious laughter between the two. They’re having fun at my expense.”The assault, Ford said, “drastically altered my life. For a very long time, I was too afraid and ashamed to tell anyone the details”. She told “very few friends” and her husband, she added.Kavanaugh angrily denied the accusation, and others about alleged drunken behaviour which roiled confirmation proceedings in a way not seen since the scandal over Clarence Thomas’s alleged sexual harassment of Anita Hill, in 1991.Backed by Republicans on the committee vociferously including the then chair, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Kavanaugh was confirmed to the court by 50 votes to 48. Only one Republican, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, declined to support him. More

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      ‘Uncharted territory’: elections officials weigh Trump’s presidency eligibility

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      After defending the integrity of US elections from an onslaught of threats over the last several years, secretaries of state across the US are now turning to a new high-stakes question: is Donald Trump eligible to run for president?Several secretaries are already working with attorneys general in their states and studying whether Trump is disqualified under a provision of the 14th amendment that bars anyone from holding public office if they have previously taken an oath to the United States and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same”. That language clearly disqualifies Trump from running in 2024, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, two prominent conservative scholars, concluded in a lengthy forthcoming law review article. “If the public record is accurate, the case is not even close. He is no longer eligible to the office of Presidency, or any other state or federal office covered by the Constitution. All who are committed to the Constitution should take note and say so,” they write in the article.A flurry of challenges to Trump’s candidacy are expected – one was filed in Colorado on Wednesday – but the legal issues at play are largely untested. Never before has the provision been used to try to disqualify a presidential candidate from office and the issue is likely to quickly come to a head as soon as officials make their official certifications about who can appear on primary ballots. Secretaries are studying who has the authority to remove Trump from the ballot and what process needs to occur before they do so. They also recognize that the issue is likely to be ultimately settled by the courts, including the US supreme court.Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat in her second term as Michigan’s secretary of state, said she had spoken with another secretary of state about the 14th amendment issue “nearly every day”.“The north star for me is always: ‘What is the law? What does the constitution require?’ To keep politics and partisan considerations out of it. And simply just look at this from a sense of ‘what does the 14th amendment say?’ We’re in unprecedented, uncharted territory,” she said.Among the uncertain questions is the proper timing for the challenges. It’s theoretically possible that a challenge to Trump’s ability to hold office could continue even if he were to win the 2024 election.“There are a lot of ambiguities and unknowns still yet to play out,” Benson added. “Even if the former president does get elected in the fall of ’24, it could re-emerge then after an election. So we’re also preparing for a lack of finality of this and for it to be an issue throughout the cycle.”Several secretaries are studying how state law might intersect with the disqualification language in the 14th amendment. In Arizona, for example, the state supreme court ruled against disqualifying three candidates for their involvement in efforts to overturn the election, saying state law did not allow for the use of the 14th amendment as the basis for a challenge. Unlike Trump, however, none of those three officials were charged with a crime.“The state of the law in Arizona leans in one direction; the plain language of the constitution, including the supremacy clause, leans in a different direction,” said Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who was elected Arizona’s secretary of state last year.“Regardless of whether or not the Arizona supreme court is correct – and I don’t think they are, I think they are dead flat wrong – but if I go against a standing rule in Arizona, is that something I can do? Or that I should do? So really these are the kinds of questions that we’re trying to answer and we’re being very deliberate and we’re being very judicious in our approach.”Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, said she had been studying the issue, but said her office wouldn’t address it before a candidate officially filed for the ballot. “While people outside of the business of running elections are free to speculate and inquire, debate, that is not our job. Our job is to follow the law and the constitution and not to make premature conclusions or speculation about what might or might not happen,” she said.One left-leaning group, Free Speech for People, has urged several secretaries of state to unilaterally say Trump is ineligible from being listed on the ballot. But such an idea may be a non-starter for officials who know that they’re likely to face intense backlash over such a decision.“For a secretary of state to remove a candidate would only reinforce the grievances of those who see the system as rigged and corrupt,” Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal under the headline “I Can’t Keep Trump Off the Ballot”. Raffensperger acknowledged there was a legal process to remove candidates from the ballot in Georgia – an effort to disqualify Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene failed last year – but said voters should decide the issue.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn an alarming signal of the minefield that secretaries are stepping into, many offices have started receiving threatening and harassing phone calls and emails about Trump’s eligibility. In New Hampshire, the office of the secretary of state, Dave Scanlan, a Republican, was flooded with phone calls after the conservative personality Charlie Kirk falsely said Scanlan was planning to remove Trump from the ballot. (Scanlan had merely said he was studying the issue.)“We’ve been getting a lot of input, literally hundreds of inquiries, not all of it friendly. I’ll leave it at that,” Arizona’s Fontes said.“We all have been buried in an uptick of visceral vitriol and threats from people on both sides – people who want us to remove him from the ballot, people who don’t,” Benson said. “We’re also seeing this as the beginning of the rancor that we expect to go through the next 19 months.”Regardless of the pressures elections officials face, Fontes said he wouldn’t shy away from making an uncomfortable decision.“We live in a land where the rule of law is the rule of law. And when a determination gets made, a determination gets made,” he said. “If people are dissatisfied with their decisions, if I choose to run for re-election, they’ll be able to speak their voices in a free and fair election to decide whether I should stay in office or not.”Questions about Trump’s eligibility need to be resolved not just for this election, but for future ones as well, Fontes said.“This is a question that I think needs to be answered broadly and certainly. I’m looking at this as far more than just about one person and one office,” he added. “This is a systemic sort of thing and it is as big as the constitution itself.” More

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      Former Trump White House adviser found guilty of contempt of Congress

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      A White House adviser to Donald Trump was found guilty of contempt of Congress on Thursday when he refused to cooperate with an investigation of the deadly January 6 attack on the US Capitol.Peter Navarro, a senior trade adviser during Trump’s presidency and who had promoted his baseless claims of mass voter fraud, was convicted in Washington’s federal courthouse after a short trial.He was convicted of two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress, both punishable by up to a year behind bars.Judge Amit Mehta scheduled Navarro’s sentencing for 12 January.Navarro had been subpoenaed in February 2022 by the House committee investigating how and why Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, interrupting certification of Joe Biden’s election victory.The committee thought he might have more information about any connection between those claims and the attack on Congress.But Navarro did not hand over any emails, reports or notes. When the date came for him to testify before the committee, he did not show up.A defense attorney, Stanley Woodward, told the jury Navarro did get in touch with committee staffers but asked them to talk to Trump to see what information he intended to be protected by executive privilege. That never happened, Woodward said.Prosecutors, though, said Navarro should have handed over what material he could have and flagged any questions or documents believed to be protected under executive privilege. They said much of the material the committee sought was already publicly available.“Peter Navarro made a choice. He chose not to abide by the congressional subpoena,” prosecutor Elizabeth Aloi said. “The defendant chose allegiance to former president Donald Trump over compliance to the subpoena.”Navarro, a former economics professor, was the second Trump aide to face criminal charges after refusing to cooperate with the House committee.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSteve Bannon, a sometime White House adviser and full-time far-right provocateur, was convicted of two counts of contempt of Congress and sentenced to four months in prison. He has been free while appealing the verdict.On Thursday after Navarro was found guilty, Woodward moved for a mistrial, saying that the jurors had taken an outdoor break near where protesters and media regularly gather outside the courthouse and came back with a verdict shortly after. Mehta did not immediately rule, but said he would consider written arguments on the issue.The House January 6 committee completed its work in January, saying Trump criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 election and failed to act to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol.Separately, the US justice department has charged Trump on four criminal counts related to his election subversion efforts. He also faces state 13 counts in Georgia, related to election subversion there.The Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      First hearing held in Georgia for 2020 election interference case

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      A Fulton county judge said that he hoped to decide on trial schedules in the Georgia election interference case next week, a case for which a joint trial will take approximately four months, according to state prosecutors.On Wednesday, the judge Scott McAfee held the first hearing in the Georgia election interference case involving 19 co-defendants including ex-president Donald Trump, who have been charged with interfering in the 2020 presidential elections.During the hearing, a prosecutor from the Fulton county district attorney’s office said that a joint trial involving all 19 defendants will take approximately four months.The prosecutor Nathan Wade also said that the trial will involve approximately 150 witnesses and that the timeline does not account for jury selection.McAfee also denied the request of Kenneth Chesebro to sever his case from his co-defendant Sidney Powell and ordered the two defendants to stand trial on 23 October together.McAfee disagreed with requests from Chesebro and Powell – both attorneys who worked alongside the Trump campaign in 2020 – who wanted their cases to be handled separately from other defendants. Both Chesebro and Powell have also filed motions for a speedy trial.Chesebro’s attorney Scott Grubman argued that while Chesebro’s case surrounds the fake electors scheme, Powell’s case revolves primarily around Coffee county’s voting systems breach.“You’re going to have two cases in one. You’re going to have days, if not weeks, God forbid months, of testimony just related to the Coffee county allegations,” Grubman argued.Manubir “Manny” Arora, another attorney of Chesebro’s, echoed similar sentiments, saying that Powell’s charges have “nothing to do with Mr Chesebro”.Meanwhile, state prosecutor Wade argued that even if Chesebro and Powell’s cases were severed, the Fulton county district attorney’s office would “absolutely” still require the same amount of time and witnesses to try the case.Nevertheless, McAfee disagreed, saying: “Based on what’s been presented today, I am not finding the severance from Mr Chesbro or Ms Powell is necessary to achieve a fair determination of the guilt or innocence for either defendant in this case.”McAfee, who decided to adhere to Chesebro and Powell’s request for a speedy trial, has yet to issue a final ruling on whether the remaining 17 co-defendants will also be tried in October.“It sounds like the state is still sticking to the position that all these defendants should remain and they want to address some of these removal issues,” McAfee said on Wednesday. “I’m willing to hear that. I remain very skeptical, but we can – I’m willing to hear what you have to say on it,” he added.McAfee gave prosecutors until Tuesday to submit a brief on whether the 23 October trial will include only Chesebro and Powell or all of the defendants. More

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      Pressure grows on Clarence Thomas after more gifts from rightwing donor

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      The conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas faced further controversy on Thursday after the release of his financial disclosure form for 2022 provided evidence of more flights and stays with Harlan Crow, a Republican mega-donor.Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island and judiciary committee member, called the form a “late-come effort at ‘clean-up on aisle three’” which would not “deter us from fully investigating the massive, secret, rightwing billionaire influence in which this court is enmired”.A series of bombshell reports have detailed long relationships between Thomas, rich donors and influential rightwing figures. In the case of Crow, a real-estate baron and collector of Nazi memorabilia, ProPublica has reported gifts of luxury travel and resort stays, a property purchase involving Thomas’s mother and school fees paid for his great-nephew.Thomas is the senior conservative on a court dominated 6-3 by the right, a majority that has handed down epochal rulings including Dobbs v Jackson, which removed the right to abortion.From the left, calls for Thomas to resign or be impeached have proliferated. In the Senate, Democrats have advanced supreme court ethics reform. Given that Republicans have sufficient votes to prevent all such actions – and that the chief justice, John Roberts, has rebuffed calls to testify – chances of change seem slim.Thomas, 75, has denied wrongdoing, saying he was advised he did not need to disclose trips and gifts from rich donors as they were “hospitality from close personal friends”.His 2022 disclosure form was released on the last day of August after he – and another conservative beset by reporting about donor relationships, Samuel Alito – requested 90-day extensions to the usual deadline. In an unusual move, Thomas’s form included a lengthy defence of previous filings.In one striking contention, the justice claimed protests over the Dobbs decision, after it leaked in May 2022, justified his use of Crow’s private plane for a trip to Texas to speak at a rightwing conference.“Because of the increased security risk following the Dobbs opinion leak,” the form said, “the May flights were by private plane for official travel as filer’s security detail recommended noncommercial travel whenever possible.”Thomas’s lawyer, Elliot S Berke, said the justice had “always strived for full transparency and adherence to the law, including with respect to what personal travel needed to be reported”.Berke also criticised “ethics complaints filed against Justice Thomas by leftwing organisations … diametrically opposed to his judicial philosophy” and “leftwing ‘watchdog’ groups … attacking Justice Thomas for alleged ethical violations stemming from his relationships with personal friends who happen to be wealthy”.In his own statement, Kyle Herrig, senior adviser to the watchdog Accountable.US, said: “It’s no surprise that Justice Thomas has kept up his decades-long cozy relationship with billionaire benefactor Harlan Crow with even more lavish jet rides and vacation reimbursements.“For years, Thomas has used his position on our nation’s highest court as a way to upgrade his own lifestyle – and that hasn’t stopped.“… Harlan Crow, Justice Thomas, Leonard Leo, and other key players … may believe they exist above the law, but they don’t. We need accountability and reform now.”Another court observer, Gabe Roth of Fix the Court, addressed the unusual statement appended to Thomas’s declarations form.“Justice Thomas’s lengthy explanation as to why he omitted various gifts and free trips on previous disclosures does not countermand his decades of willful obfuscation when it comes to his reporting requirements,” Roth said.“What’s more, he’s chosen not to update earlier reports with details about the tuition gift, the RV loan” – from Anthony Welters, a healthcare magnate, and first reported by the New York Times – “or his countless private plane fights, all of which were reportable.“It’s time for the Judicial Conference, as required by the disclosure law, to refer these issues to the [US] justice department for further investigation.” More