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      House Republicans’ report contradicts witness account of Trump’s wheel-grab

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      US House Republicans on Monday released a report they said contradicted sensational January 6 committee testimony in which a former aide to Donald Trump described being told that as the attack on Congress unfolded, the then president was so eager to join supporters at the Capitol he tried to grab the wheel of his car.“The testimony of … four White House employees directly contradicts claims made by Cassidy Hutchinson and by the select committee in the final report,” read the report by the House administration subcommittee on oversight, which searched for alleged bias or malpractice in the January 6 investigation.“None of the White House employees corroborated Hutchinson’s sensational story about President Trump lunging for the steering wheel of the Beast,” the report said, referring to the colloquial name for cars that carry the president.“Some witnesses did describe the president’s mood after the speech at the Ellipse. It is highly improbable that the other White House employees would have heard about the president’s mood in the SUV following his speech at the Ellipse, but not heard the sensational story that Hutchinson claims Anthony Ornato, the White House deputy chief of staff for operations, told her after returning to the White House on January 6.”Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump and his final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, testified before the January 6 committee in private and in public.In public, her testimony about Trump’s anger at his inability to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden made her a star witness, compared by some to John Dean, the White House counsel whose testimony sealed Richard Nixon’s fate in the Watergate scandal.In especially memorable testimony, Hutchinson described what she said Ornato told her about Trump’s reaction, after telling supporters to “fight like hell”, to being told he could not go with them to the Capitol, to try to block election certification.According to Hutchinson, Ornato said Trump furiously lunged for the wheel before a secret service agent grabbed his arm and said: “Sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel. We’re going back to the West Wing. We’re not going to the Capitol.”Hutchinson said she was told “Trump then used his free hand to lunge towards Bobby Engel [an agent] and when Mr Ornato recounted the story to me, he motioned towards his clavicles”.Questioned by Liz Cheney, an anti-Trump Republican and January 6 committee vice-chair, Hutchinson said Engel did not dispute the account. It was soon reported that Engel did dispute it, and wanted to testify under oath.Among transcripts released on Monday, the unnamed agent who drove Trump said: “The president was insistent on going to the Capitol. It was clear to me he wanted to go to the Capitol.”“He was not screaming at Mr Engel. He was not screaming at me. Certainly his voice was raised, but it did not seem to me that he was irate – [he] certainly … didn’t seem as irritated or agitated as he had on the way to the Ellipse,” the area near the White House where Trump addressed supporters.The driver added: “I did not see him reach. He never grabbed the steering wheel. I didn’t see him, you know, lunge to try to get into the front seat at all. You know, what stood out was the irritation in his voice, more than his physical presence.”The transcript was among those the January 6 committee did not release, citing security concerns. The transcripts were eventually released with redactions.On Monday, the New York Times said former January 6 committee aides said its final report included details of the driver’s interview and no cover-up was attempted.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe final report said: “The committee has now obtained evidence from several sources about a ‘furious interaction’ in the SUV. The vast majority of witnesses who have testified before the select committee about this topic, including multiple members of the secret service, a member of the Metropolitan police, and national security and military officials in the White House, described President Trump’s behavior as ‘irate’, ‘furious’, ‘insistent’, ‘profane’ and ‘heated’.”It also said: “It is difficult to fully reconcile the accounts of several of the witnesses who provided information with what we heard from Engel and Ornato. But the principal factual point here is clear and undisputed: President Trump specifically and repeatedly requested to be taken to the Capitol. He was insistent and angry, and continued to push to travel to the Capitol even after returning to the White House.”On Monday, Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, the Republican select committee chair, said the report showed “firsthand testimony directly contradicts Cassidy Hutchinson’s story and the [January 6] committee’s narrative. Although the committee had this critical information, they still promoted Ms Hutchinson’s third-hand version of events.”Now 27, Hutcinson has released a memoir and become a prominent figure on the anti-Trump right. On Monday, her attorney re-released a letter to Loudermilk first sent in January.“Since Ms Hutchinson changed counsel,” the letter said, referring to her decision to stop using lawyers provided by Trump, “she has and will continue to tell the truth.“While other individuals … would not speak with the select committee, Ms Hutchinson and many other witnesses courageously stepped forward. Yet she now finds herself being questioned by you and your subcommittee regarding her testimony and on matters that may also be the subject of ongoing criminal proceedings against Mr Trump.”Trump, 77, is the presumptive Republican nominee to face Biden again in the fall. He still faces 91 criminal charges, 17 concerning attempted election subversion. Though Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection, Senate Republicans assured his acquittal.Hutchinson, her lawyer said, would not “succumb to a pressure campaign from those who seek to silence her”. More

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      Kansas Republicans criticized for ‘vile’ stunt with dummy in Biden mask

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      Kansas Republicans were condemned as “vile and wrong” after attendees at a fundraising event beat and kicked a martial arts dummy wearing a Joe Biden mask.Dinah Sykes, the Democratic minority leader in the state senate, told the Kansas Reflector, a nonprofit news site: “Political violence of any kind is vile and wrong, and we cannot afford to brush it under the rug when others encourage it.”Footage posted to social media showed attendees at the Johnson county Republican event kicking and beating the dummy, which was wearing a Biden mask and a T-shirt displaying the slogan “Let’s go Brandon”, a rightwing meme mean to disparage Biden.Sykes called for state Republican leaders to take action against those responsible.Mike Brown, the Kansas Republican party chair, told the Kansas City Star he was not at the event, which was not organised by the state party, though he sent emails to promote it.Mike Kuckelman, a former state Republican chair, condemned the event.“This conduct is shameful, and it is WRONG,” Kuckelman wrote on Facebook. “Brown and [Johnson county GOP chair Maria] Holiday must resign. Republicans, especially elected Republicans, must demand [this]. Silence is complicity in this case.”Citing Republican uproar in 2017 when the comedian Kathy Griffin posed with an effigy of Donald Trump’s severed head, Kuckelman added: “I don’t agree with President Biden’s policies, but he is a fellow human being. No one should condone or defend this horrific and shameful conduct.“We are Republicans, and we are better than this.”Holiday told the Star the dummy was part of a booth run by a karate school, promoting self-defence. She also said Kuckelman’s post was inaccurate but did not explain how, the Star said.Kuckelman told the Star the stunt was “just gross”. The paper’s editorial board agreed, but took issue with his claim that Republicans were “better” than the behaviour displayed in Johnson county.“That’s unfortunately no longer true,” the Star said, citing Trump’s campaign-trail mockery of Biden’s stutter; his refusal to stop attacking the writer E Jean Carroll, who he was ordered to pay $83.3m for defamation arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”; and his advocacy of violence against migrants, protesters and political opponents.“So while it’s great that there are still Republicans out there who expect better,” the paper said, “it’s their own leader who encourages worse …“If more Republicans in Kansas and beyond really believed that juvenile, disrespectful behavior were inexcusable, Donald Trump would not be running their party, and bringing out the worst in their partisans.” More

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      Katie Britt defends sex trafficking story she falsely links to Biden presidency

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      In her first interview since delivering her widely ridiculed rebuttal to Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech, Republican senator Katie Britt refused to apologize for invoking a story about child rape that she implied resulted from the president’s handling of the ongoing crisis at the southern US border – even though the abuse occurred years earlier in Mexico while her party controlled the White House.Britt, 42, appeared on Fox News Sunday and denied hiding the fact that the rape and sex trafficking case to which she referred had actually occurred during the presidency of George W Bush. She also made it a point to criticize what she called “the liberal media” for how they have covered her rebuttal to Biden’s speech on Thursday, which earned being parodied on the latest episode of Saturday Night Live.“I very specifically said … I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12. So I didn’t say a teenager – I didn’t say a young woman,” Britt replied after being asked whether she intended to give the impression that the abuse occurred under the Biden administration’s watch. “[It was] a grown woman … trafficked when she was 12.”Britt also said: “To me, it is disgusting to try to silence the voice of telling the story of what it is like to be sex trafficked.”The junior Alabama senator’s remarks to Fox News Sunday came after even her fellow Republicans pronounced her rejoinder on Thursday to Biden’s State of the Union speech – from the setting of a kitchen – “one of our biggest disasters”.During that rebuttal, as she oscillated between smiling and seeming to fight back tears, Britt described traveling to the Del Rio sector of the US-Mexico border and speaking to a woman whom the senator said had relayed horrific experiences.“She had been sex-trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12,” Britt said. “She told me not just that she was raped every day – but how many times a day she was raped.”Britt avoided saying when or where the abuse took place. But she strongly implied that it had stemmed from the Biden administration’s management of immigration issues at the southern border.“We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a third-world country. This is the United States of America. And it’s past time we start acting like it. President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace,” Britt said. “It’s despicable, and it’s almost entirely preventable.”On Friday, in a seven-minute video on TikTok, author and former Associated Press reporter Jonathan Katz established that Britt was describing events that unfolded in Mexico in between 2004 and 2008, when Bush was president.The tale centered on Karla Jacinto Romero, an activist who in May 2015 testified to Congress about her experiences at the hands of sex traffickers who held her captive between the ages of 12 and 16 in her native Mexico. Britt met Jacinto Romero on a visit to the border with other Republican senators in January 2023.But while the meeting with Jacinto Romero, now 31, occurred shortly after Britt took office, her abuse occurred as many as two decades earlier and not in the US.Katz lambasted Britt as dishonest and misleading, and many others have since done the same. A Biden White House spokesperson on Sunday issued a statment which said Britt had peddled “debunked lies”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA spokesperson for Britt confirmed to the Washington Post that the senator was referring to Jacinto Romero in her speech Thursday. Yet that spokesperson also insisted Britt’s presentation of Jacinto Romero’s story was “100% correct”. And Britt doubled down on that position Sunday.“This is a story of what is happening,” Britt said. “We have to tell those stories, and the liberal media needs to pay attention to it because there are victims all the way coming to the border, there are victims at the border, and then there are victims all throughout the country.”Britt’s guest spot on Fox News Sunday came hours after the actor Scarlett Johansson stood in a kitchen portraying the Alabama senator and satirized the latter’s State of the Union rebuttal on Saturday Night Live’s cold open.Among other things, Johansson said sarcastically: “I’ve invited you into this empty kitchen because Republicans want me to appeal to women voters and women love kitchens.”Britt went out of her way Sunday to explain “exactly why [she] was sitting at a kitchen table” when she rebutted Biden.“Republicans care about kitchen table issues,” Britt said. “We care about faith, family. We care about freedom.” More

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      Journalist says Katie Britt’s story about child sex abuse ‘out-and-out lie’

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      Doubts have been cast on the accuracy of a story about horrific child sex abuse told by the Republican senator Katie Britt in her widely ridiculed speech delivered in rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.The journalist and author Jonathan Katz has accused Britt of being “fundamentally dishonest” for invoking the case of a woman who had been sex-trafficked at age 12 and raped multiple times to illustrate the supposed failure of the Biden administration’s border control policies.The controversy further intensifies the spotlight on Britt – a rising Republican star – after she came under fire from members of her own party for delivering a rejoinder to Biden on Thursday from the setting of a kitchen.In that speech, Britt described travelling to the Del Rio sector of the US-Mexico border and cited the case of an unidentified woman, whom Britt said confided harrowing experiences. The senator implied these were a direct result of the ongoing crisis at the border, which Republicans have sought to exploit as a campaign issue.“I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me,” Britt said. “She had been sex-trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped.”The senator did not say where or when the events occurred, but in outraged tones she implied that they had happened in the US on Biden’s watch: “We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a third-world country. This is the United States of America. And it’s past time we start acting like it. President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace. It’s despicable and it’s almost entirely preventable.”However, in a seven-minute video posted on TikTok, Katz – a former AP reporter who has written on drug wars in Mexico – cited details that appeared to show the story Britt was describing had happened not just outside the US, but many years before Biden became president.He concluded that Britt had deliberately misrepresented the tale of Karla Jacinto Romero, an activist who has publicly recounted her experiences on numerous occasions at the hands of sex traffickers in her native Mexico.Now 31, Romero testified to a US Congressional subcommittee in May 2015 describing her experiences at the hands of a trafficker who held her captive between the ages of 12 and 16, before she was eventually rescued. She has also spoken before the Mexican house of representatives and the Vatican.Britt met Jacinto Romero on a visit to the border with two other Republican senators, Marsha Blackburn and Cindy-Hyde Smith, in January 2023.The visit was described on Blackburn’s senatorial webpage, which included photos of the three senators sharing a platform with Romero at a news conference.In his video, Katz dissected what he said was Britt’s attempt to conflate Romero’s story with the US-Mexico border imbroglio, where the build-up of asylum seekers promises to become a central issue in the 2024 presidential election, before lambasting her for “dishonesty”.Katz said that Britt, by not giving a location or a timeframe for the story, had deliberately tried to create a “beyond misleading” impression that the events had taken place recently and on US soil.“All I had to do was key in Karla Jacinto Romero’s name … and it took me to [her] testimony to Congress from 2015 about her experiences in Mexico,” he said.“It took place between 2004 and 2008. I don’t know what they put in the textbooks of Alabama these days, but Joe Biden was not the president of the United States in 2004 or 2008. In 2004 and 2008, the president of the United States was George W Bush, a Republican. [But] none of this really matters because none of these events took place in the United States – or even near the border.”Katz added: “It seems very clear to me that she is trying to create an association in people’s minds between Joe Biden, the border, Mexicans, you know, Latins – people of Latin descent – and sexual violence. That’s what she’s going for and she is doing it on the basis of something that you can only say is an out-and-out lie.“It must have been obvious to her, at the very least, that she was not talking to somebody who had recently been 12 years old.”Katz said he had sought a comment from Britt’s spokesperson but had received no reply. “For now, it just looks as if she got up on national television and lied about something really horrific and important – and for her own personal and her party’s political gain,” he said.In a statement to media outlets, Britt’s spokesperson Sean Ross sidestepped commenting on whether the senator had been alluding to Romero in Thursday’s speech but insisted her account was “100% correct”.“The Biden administration’s policies – the policies in this country that the president falsely claims are humane – have empowered the cartels and acted as a magnet to a historic level of migrants making the dangerous journey to our border,” he said. “Along that journey, children, women and men are being subjected to gut-wrenching, heartbreaking horrors in our own backyard.”Following Britt’s speech, the gun control advocate Shannon Watts noted that the senator had used stories of sexual abuse in an effort to elect Donald Trump, who has been accused of rape in an allegation a judge called “substantially true”, and of assault or misconduct by more than 20 other women. “Senator Katie Britt says sexual assault is the worst thing that can happen to a woman while encouraging Americans to vote for a convicted sexual predator,” Watts said. More

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      Republicans in Georgia put candidates through purity tests. Now they’re facing fines

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      Taxes. Vaccinations. Chickens.Republican party leaders in Catoosa county, in the north-west corner of Georgia, ran prospective GOP candidates through a battery of ideological questions, permitting some to run in the party primary while denying others.Local political purity tests have been discussed by both Republican and Democratic party officials for years, but this is the first time a county’s political body has actually attempted the feat.Perhaps that’s because of the punishing backlash now facing the six executive committee members of the Catoosa county Republican party after a lawsuit from disqualified candidates: fines of $1,000 an hour, times four for the number of Republican candidates the county’s GOP body refused to put on the ballot, times six for each of the executive committee members. That’s $24,000 an hour for the whole group until they comply with a judge’s order to put the candidates on the ballot.“The criteria they’re using is how we vote in the commission meetings,” said Vanita Hullander, a Catoosa county commissioner initially barred by the county’s GOP leaders from running for re-election as a Republican in the 14 May primary. “They’re very manipulative, and they’ve been trying to take control of the commission for a long time.”Hullander is a lifelong conservative Republican, she said. But after the county party’s executive committee questioned her about votes on local tax increases, vaccination requirements and a contentious local ordinance governing where and how residents may keep chickens on their property, it declared it would not allow her on the Republican ballot line. The group also barred three others.Others, like Jimmy Gray, a candidate for commissioner, were not barred. Notably, Gray’s stepmother, Regina Gray, is chairwoman of the Graysville precinct of the county’s party.The disqualifications would have left only one person running for the chairperson’s seat: Nick Ware, a perennial candidate with hard libertarian views.“This is my opinion: a number of people on the committee … they’re really libertarians,” said Chuck Harris, a Catoosa county commissioner who is not up for re-election this cycle. He first learned of the leanings of the county’s Republican chair, Joanna Hildreth, when Hildreth was working with a candidate who needed signatures to make a libertarian run against Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Hildreth asked the candidate, whom Harris didn’t name, to bad-mouth him to voters as she gathered those signatures.“This was a month after I signed a loyalty oath in front of Hildreth for the party,” he said. “They’ll be coming for me next.”The prospect of barring candidates for insufficient political fidelity has been raised by both parties at one point or another in Georgia and elsewhere. For example, North Carolina’s Democratic party is contending today with the state representative Tricia Cotham, who ran in an open Charlotte-area seat as a Democrat and then immediately switched parties to give Republicans a veto-proof supermajority.But a county-level process runs a risk of ideological capture by political extremists who do not reflect the politics of most voters.GOP county committee seats in Georgia are won in caucuses typically attended by no more than a few hundred voters in any given county every election cycle. (The Catoosa county Republican party happens to be holding its next county convention on 23 March.) Executive committee seats are then won by a vote of committee members. Republicans have about a five-to-one electoral advantage in Catoosa county. About 32,000 voters cast ballots in the county in 2020.Hildreth, the county’s Republican chair, is also secretary of the Georgia Republican Assembly (GRA), a political action committee dominated by libertarians who have regularly been shut out of GOP party governance positions. The GRA’s chair is Alex Johnson, who has lost multiple races for Georgia GOP leadership positions. Johnson previously proposed a state party rule allowing party delegates to block candidates for statewide office on the basis of their fidelity to “Republican values”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJohnson’s law partner, Catherine Bernard, is also Georgia’s national director for the National Federation of Republican Assemblies. The two of them are representing Catoosa county Republican party executive committee members in their defense against the lawsuit from the disqualified candidates.Bernard did not return a call seeking comment. Hildreth asked for questions to be submitted by email, but has not yet replied.In court Thursday, Hildreth was asked whether she would allow the candidates to be qualified to run for office, as ordered by the court. She said she would not and would instead appeal. Later that day the four candidates denied by the executive committee went to the party headquarters in the company of two Catoosa county sheriff’s deputies to sign qualification papers. Party members refused them entry.The Catoosa county Republican party committee released a statement late on Friday.“Draining the Swamp starts locally,” the statement reads, in part. “The Catoosa County Republican Party is fully run by Republican volunteers elected in a process open to Catoosa County voters. These grassroots citizens meet candidates, observe voting records, and work to ensure Republicans are elected to office. Catoosa County GOP is committed to ensuring that Catoosa County Republican candidates reflect the values of Catoosa County Republican voters.”The order from the superior court judge Don Thompson of the Lookout Mountain judicial circuit noted that state law does not allow subjective criteria to be used to bar a candidate from a party’s ballot line. In court, Thompson said he had chosen not to jail the executive board members because he believed they had been led astray by bad advice, and suggested that they retain new counsel.The clock on the fines started ticking at about 3.15pm on Thursday, and ended at noon Friday, after a judge ordered the county’s elections office to certify their qualification on the ballot directly. Collectively, the committee members have amassed fines just under $500,000.“The rest of the state should be scared and nervous if a small, self-appointed group of people gets to decide who to vote for on a party-type election,” Harris said. “The primary is really the election, because if you don’t have a strong Democrat or independent challenger, you basically win your election at the primary.” More

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      Far-right Montana congressman says he’s quitting politics after ‘death threat’

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      A Republican congressman from Montana has announced that he is quitting politics after he says his failed recent bid for the US senate led to “a death threat” against him as well as “false and defamatory rumors” about him and his family.Matt Rosendale, a member of the far-right House freedom caucus, signed up in February to participate in Montana’s Republican primary to challenge the Democratic incumbent, Jon Tester, in November. But Rosendale soon withdrew after Donald Trump and the National Republican Senatorial Committee each endorsed his opponent, Tim Sheehy, an aerospace millionaire and retired navy seal.He initially planned to seek re-election to the seat he has held since 2021 but encountered political headwinds. Notably, his office threatened to sue the former Democratic senator Heidi Heitkamp after she appeared on the 26 February episode of the Talking Feds with Harry Litman podcast and accused Rosendale of bailing from the Senate primary because he had impregnated a staff member.In addition to a lawsuit threat aimed at Heitkamp, Rosendale’s office responded with a statement calling the congresswoman’s allegation “100% false and defamatory”.Rosendale, 63, had another prominent detractor in Marjorie Taylor Greene, a fellow rightwing extremist member of Congress who endorsed Sheehy in the Republican primary to challenge Tester. Greene called Rosendale a “grifter” and insinuated that he wasn’t truly loyal to Trump.On Friday, Rosendale said he had intended to pursue re-election to his congressional post “at the urging of many, including several of the current candidates”. But since then, his statement said, “I have been forced to have law enforcement visit my children because of a death threat against me and false and defamatory rumors against me and my family”.Rosendale’s statement didn’t elaborate but added: “This has taken a serious toll on me and my family.“The current attacks have made it impossible for me to focus on my work to serve you. So, in the best interest of my family and the community, I am withdrawing from the House race and will not be seeking office.”Rosendale said he would remain in Congress until his term expires in early 2025. Those who have signed up to run for his seat in November include Denny Rehberg, who from 2001 until 2013 served as what was then Montana’s lone congressional representative.The brief Senate run that preceded Rosendale’s political retirement was his second attempt at Tester’s seat. He ran against Tester in 2018 but lost by a little more than three percentage points.Rosendale had previously been Montana’s state auditor and in its legislature. He was among the group of conservative insurgents who made former Republican US House speaker Kevin McCarthy endure 15 rounds of votes before he was given the chamber’s gavel in early 2023.McCarthy retired last year after being ousted as House speaker in October. His replacement as speaker was the Louisiana Republican Mike Johnson, who at one point pledged to endorse Rosendale’s more recent Senate run before reportedly changing his mind when faced with backlash from within their party. More

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      The Lie Detectives: Trump, US politics and the disinformation damage done

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      Most of Joe Biden’s past supporters see him as too old. An 81-year-old president with an unsteady step is a turn-off. But Donald Trump, Biden’s malignant, 77-year-old predecessor, vows to be a dictator for “a day”, calls for suspending the constitution and threatens Nato. “Russia, if you’re listening”, his infamous 2016 shout-out to Vladimir Putin, still haunts us eight years on. Democracy is on the ballot again.Against this bleak backdrop, Sasha Issenberg delivers The Lie Detectives, an examination of disinformation in politics. It is a fitting follow-up to The Victory Lab, his look at GOTV (“getting out the vote”) which was published weeks before the 2012 US election.Issenberg lectures at UCLA and writes for Monocle. He has covered presidential campaigns for the Boston Globe and he co-founded Votecastr, a private venture designed to track, project and publish real-time results. Voting science, though, is nothing if not tricky. A little after 4pm on election day 2016, hours before polls closed, Votecastr calculations led Slate to pronounce: Hillary Clinton Has to Like Where She Stands in Florida.The Victory Lab and The Lie Detectives are of a piece, focused on the secret sauce of winning campaigns. More than a decade ago, Issenberg gave props to Karl Rove, the architect of George W Bush’s successful election drives, and posited that micro-targeting voters had become key to finishing first. He also observed that ideological conflicts had become marbled through American politics. On that front, there has been an acceleration. These days, January 6 and its aftermath linger but much of the country has moved on, averting its gaze or embracing alternative facts.In 2016, Issenberg and Joshua Green of Businessweek spoke to Trump campaign digital gurus who bragged of using the internet to discourage prospective Clinton supporters.“We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” Issenberg and Green quote a senior official as saying. “They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women and African Americans.”It was micro-targeting on steroids.The exchange stuck with Issenberg. “I thought back often to that conversation with the Trump officials in the years that followed,” he writes now. “I observed so much else online that was manufactured and perpetuated with a similarly brazen impunity.”In The Lie Detectives, Issenberg pays particular attention and respect to Jiore Craig and her former colleagues at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a leading Democratic polling and strategy firm founded by Stan Greenberg, Bill Clinton’s pollster. Issenberg also examines the broader liberal ecosystem and its members, including the billionaire Reid Hoffman, a founder of LinkedIn and PayPal. The far-right former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and his “office of hate” come under the microscope too.Craig’s experience included more than a dozen elections across six continents. But until Trump’s triumph, she had not worked on a domestic race. To her, to quote Issenberg, US politics was essentially “a foreign country”. Nonetheless, Craig emerged as the Democrats’ go-to for countering disinformation.“It was a unique moment in time where everybody who had looked for an answer up until that point had been abundantly wrong,” Craig says. “The fact that I had to start every race in a new country with the building blocks allowed me to see things that you couldn’t.”No party holds a monopoly on disinformation. In a 2017 special election for US Senate in Alabama, Democratic-aligned consultants launched Project Birmingham, a $100,000 disinformation campaign under which Republicans were urged to cast write-in ballots instead of voting for Roy Moore, the controversial GOP candidate.The project posed as a conservative operation. Eventually, Hoffman acknowledged funding it, but disavowed knowledge of disinformation and said sorry. Doug Jones, the Democrat, won by fewer than 22,000 votes. The write-in total was 22,819.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMore recently, Steve Kramer, a campaign veteran working for Dean Phillips, a long-shot candidate for the Democratic nomination against Biden, launched an AI-generated robocall that impersonated the president.Comparing himself to Paul Revere and Thomas Paine, patriots who challenged the mother country, Kramer, who also commissioned a deepfake impersonation of Senator Lindsey Graham, said Phillips was not in on the effort. If the sorry little episode showed anything, it showed disinformation is here to stay.Under the headline Disinformation on steroids: is the US prepared for AI’s influence on the election?, a recent Guardian story said: “Without clear safeguards, the impact of AI on the election might come down to what voters can discern as real and not real.”Free speech is on the line. Last fall, the US court of appeals for the fifth circuit – “the Trumpiest court in America”, as Vox put it – unanimously held that Biden, the surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the FBI violated the first amendment by seeking to tamp down on Covid-related misinformation.In the court’s view, social media platforms were impermissibly “coerced” or “significantly encouraged” to suppress speech government officials viewed as dangerously inaccurate or misleading. The matter remains on appeal, oral argument before the supreme court set for later this month.Issenberg reminds us that Trump’s current presidential campaign has pledged that a second Trump administration will bar government agencies from assisting any effort to “label domestic speech as mis- or dis-information”. A commitment to free speech? Not exactly. More like Putinism, US-style.According to Kash Patel, a Trump administration veteran and true believer, a second Trump administration will target journalists for prosecution.“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Patel told Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chair and White House strategist. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you.”Welcome to the Trump Vengeance tour.
      The Lie Detectives is published in the US by Columbia University’s Columbia Global Reports More

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      RNC: Trump coup complete with loyalist as chair and daughter-in-law as co-chair

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      The Republican National Committee voted on Friday to install Donald Trump’s handpicked leadership team, completing his takeover of the national party as the former president closes in on a third straight presidential nomination.Michael Whatley, a North Carolina Republican who has echoed Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, was elected as the party’s national chair in a vote Friday morning in Houston.Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, was voted in as co-chair.Trump’s team is promising not to use the RNC to pay his mounting personal legal bills. But Trump and his lieutenants will have firm control of the party’s political and fundraising machinery with limited, if any, internal pushback.“The RNC is going to be the vanguard of a movement that will work tirelessly every single day to elect our nominee, Donald J Trump, as the 47th president of the United States,” Whatley told RNC members in a speech after being elected.Whatley will carry the top title, replacing the longtime chair Ronna McDaniel after she fell out of favor with key figures in the former president’s Make America Great Again movement. But he will be surrounded by people closer to Trump.Lara Trump is expected to focus largely on fundraising and media appearances, which she emphasized shortly after being voted in, taking time in her inaugural speech to hold up a check for $100,000 that she said had been contributed that day to the party. When asked by a reporter later, she declined to say who wrote the check.The functional head of the RNC will be Chris LaCivita, who will assume the committee’s chief of staff role while maintaining his job as one of the Trump campaign’s top two advisers.McDaniel had been handpicked by Trump to lead the committee seven years ago but was forced out after Trump’s Maga movement increasingly blamed her for losses over the last few years.While she got a standing ovation after her goodbye, the new leadership appeared to eagerly embrace the change. Lara Trump, accompanied by her husband, Eric Trump, was greeted like a celebrity, with members lining up to take photos with her.With Trump’s blessing, LaCivita is promising to enact sweeping changes and staffing moves at every level of the RNC to ensure it runs seamlessly as an extension of the Trump campaign.In an interview on Thursday, LaCivita sought to tamp down concerns from some RNC members that the already cash-strapped committee would help pay Trump’s legal bills. Trump faces four criminal indictments and a total of 91 counts as well as a $355m civil fraud judgment, which he is appealing. His affiliated Save America political action committee has spent $76m over the last two years on lawyers.People speculating about the RNC paying for legal bills, LaCivita said, do so “purely on the basis of trying to hurt donors”. Trump’s legal bills are being covered largely by Save America, which is a separate political entity.The new leadership team is expected to more fully embrace Trump’s focus on voter fraud and his debunked claims about the election he lost to Joe Biden. Multiple court cases and Trump’s own justice department failed to reveal any evidence of significant voting irregularities.Whatley, an attorney, has largely avoided using Trump’s characterization of Biden’s victory and said in one 2021 interview that Biden “absolutely” had been legitimately elected and had won the majority of the electoral college votes. But he said in another interview in the weeks after the 2020 election that there had been “massive fraud”. He has also made focusing on “election integrity” a top priority for his state party in the years since. More