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      US hails ‘new era’ of Asia Pacific relations as Biden hosts historic summit with Japan and South Korea – live

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      From 40m agoJoe Biden will welcome his South Korean counterpart, Yoon Suk Yeol, and Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, to Camp David for the first-ever trilateral summit with the three countries amid a recent thaw in ties between Japan and Korea.The US has promised to usher in a “new era” in relations with its most important allies in Asia, as the region struggles to address the threat posed by an increasingly assertive China and a nuclear-armed North Korea.Washington’s ties with Tokyo and Seoul are “stronger than they have been at any point in modern memory”, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at a Friday briefing, as he confirmed the US will announce “significant steps to enhance trilateral security cooperation” including new collaborations on missile defence and technology when the three leaders meet for their first standalone summit.The leaders are also expected to detail plans to invest in technology for a three-way crisis hotline and offer an update on the progress the countries have made in sharing early-warning data on missile launches.Kishida, before departing Tokyo for Washington on Thursday, called the summit a “historic occasion to bolster trilateral strategic cooperation based on our stronger-than-ever bilateral relations with the United States and South Korea”.US officials are confident that its two main allies in the region, Japan and South Korea, share Washington’s view on most global issues, although a joint statement is expected to stop short of directly referring to China to reflect South Korean reservations about openly criticising Beijing.“Japan and South Korea are core allies – not just in the region, but around the world,” the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said this week, adding that Biden’s summit would “mark what we believe is a new era in trilateral cooperation”.Blinken said he expected a continued focus on North Korea “given the endless provocation it’s taken” but added that the meeting would address a “much more expansive agenda”.China has denounced the summit, saying it “opposes relevant countries forming various cliques and their practices of exacerbating confrontation and jeopardising other countries’ strategic security.”Foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said this week:
      We hope the countries concerned will go with the trend of the times and do something conducive to regional peace, stability and prosperity.
      A standalone summit bringing together the leaders of Japan and South Korea would have been almost unthinkable just over a year ago, when the north-east Asian neighbours were embroiled in disputes over their bitter wartime legacy.Bilateral ties were at a low point before the South Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, took office in May 2022, due to compensation claims by Koreans over Japan’s use of forced labour during its 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean peninsula, and the longstanding controversy over Korean women who were coerced into working in Japanese military brothels.Yoon, a conservative, and the Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, appear to have resolved the forced labour dispute and established a warm relationship that has included a joint visit to a memorial to Korean victims of the Hiroshima atomic bombing when the city hosted the G7 summit in May.This week, Yoon described Japan as a “partner” with shared values and interests, as his county marked the 78th anniversary of its liberation from 35 years of Japanese colonial rule.The thaw in ties has been greeted with relief in Washington as it attempts to present a united regional front against Chinese military activity near Taiwan and North Korea’s development of more powerful weapons of mass destruction in defiance of UN-led sanctions.“Suffice it to say, this is a big deal,” National security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on Friday shortly before the formal start of the daylong summit.
      It is a historic event, and it sets the conditions for a more peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific, and a stronger and more secure United States of America.
      Friday’s summit will be the first time Joe Biden has used Camp David to host international leaders.Joe Biden will welcome his South Korean counterpart, Yoon Suk Yeol, and Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, to Camp David for the first-ever trilateral summit with the three countries amid a recent thaw in ties between Japan and Korea.The US has promised to usher in a “new era” in relations with its most important allies in Asia, as the region struggles to address the threat posed by an increasingly assertive China and a nuclear-armed North Korea.Washington’s ties with Tokyo and Seoul are “stronger than they have been at any point in modern memory”, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at a Friday briefing, as he confirmed the US will announce “significant steps to enhance trilateral security cooperation” including new collaborations on missile defence and technology when the three leaders meet for their first standalone summit.The leaders are also expected to detail plans to invest in technology for a three-way crisis hotline and offer an update on the progress the countries have made in sharing early-warning data on missile launches.Kishida, before departing Tokyo for Washington on Thursday, called the summit a “historic occasion to bolster trilateral strategic cooperation based on our stronger-than-ever bilateral relations with the United States and South Korea”.The US justice department is seeking 33 years in prison for Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy in one of the most serious cases to emerge from the attack on the US Capitol to block the transfer of presidential power in the hopes of keeping Donald Trump in the White House after he lost the 2020 election, according to court documents.The sentence, if imposed, would be by far the longest punishment that has been handed down in the massive prosecution of the riot on 6 January 2021. The Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy in a separate case, has received the longest sentence to date – 18 years.Tarrio, who was not at the Capitol riot itself, was a top target of what has become the largest justice department investigation in American history. He led the neo-fascist group – known for street fights with leftwing activists – when Trump infamously told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during his first election debate with Democrat Joe Biden.During the months-long trial, prosecutors argued that the Proud Boys viewed themselves as foot soldiers fighting for Trump as the Republican spread lies that Democrats stole the election from him, and were prepared to go to war to keep their preferred leader in power.“They unleashed a force on the Capitol that was calculated to exert their political will on elected officials by force and to undo the results of a democratic election,” prosecutors wrote in their filing on Thursday.
      The foot soldiers of the right aimed to keep their leader in power. They failed. They are not heroes; they are criminals.
      A judge declared Donald Trump had filed a “frivolous” appeal from his decision not to dismiss the first of writer E Jean Carroll’s two defamation lawsuits against him.US district judge Lewis Kaplan criticized the former president’s “delay” tactics, writing in a 17-page ruling:
      This case was largely stalled for years due in large part to Mr Trump’s repeated efforts to delay, which are chronicled in the Court’s prior decisions.
      Donald Trump said he had canceled a press conference scheduled for next week in which he claimed he would release a report containing new “evidence” of fraud in the state of Georgia during the 2020 presidential election.The former president, who was charged in Georgia last week with conspiring to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, said on Thursday that his lawyers would prefer putting his allegations in court filings instead.Trump, posting on his social media platform, Truth Social, wrote:
      Rather than releasing the Report on the Rigged & Stolen Georgia 2020 Presidential Election on Monday, my lawyers would prefer putting this, I believe, Irrefutable & Overwhelming evidence of Election Fraud & Irregularities in formal Legal Filings.
      Trump had claimed on Tuesday that he would publish a 100-page report at the event, which was due to be held on Monday in Bedminister, New Jersey, that would exonerate him.No compelling evidence of wide-scale fraud has emerged in the two-and-a-half years since the election in Georgia or elsewhere, despite Trump’s baseless claims.Twice impeached and now indicted in four cases: Donald Trump faces serious criminal charges in New York, Florida, Washington and Georgia over a hush-money scheme during the 2016 election, his alleged mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.As Trump prepares for those cases to go to trial, the former president is also confronting a verdict that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation of the writer E Jean Carroll. A New York jury awarded Carroll, who accused Trump of assaulting her in 1996, $5m in damages.Here is where each case against Trump stands:Lawyers for Donald Trump asked the judge overseeing his federal election interference trial to push back the start date to April 2026, nearly 18 months after the next presidential election.The lawyers filed the request to US district court judge Tanya Chutkan, after Trump was indicted earlier this month on charges that he conspired to defraud the United States, conspired to obstruct an official proceeding, obstructed an official proceeding and engaged in a conspiracy against rights.Federal prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith had proposed to schedule the trial for the start of January 2024, saying there was a significant public interest in expediting the prosecution.“A January 2 trial date would vindicate the public’s strong interest in a speedy trial,” prosecutors wrote.
      It is difficult to imagine a public interest stronger than the one in this case in which the defendant – the former president of the United States – is charged with three criminal conspiracies.
      In their court filing on Thursday, Trump’s attorneys argued a years-long delay was necessary due to the “massive” amount of information they will have to review and because of scheduling conflicts with the other criminal cases Trump is facing.
      If we were to print and stack 11.5 million pages of documents, with no gap between pages, at 200 pages per inch, the result would be a tower of paper stretching nearly 5,000 feet into the sky. That is taller than the Washington Monument, stacked on top of itself eight times, with nearly a million pages to spare.
      Good morning, US politics blog readers. Lawyers for former president Donald Trump asked the judge presiding over his federal 2020 election interference case to schedule his trial for April 2026 – more than two and a half years from now.In a 16-page filing on Thursday, the lawyers argued that putting Trump on trial this coming January – as federal prosecutors have requested – would mark a “rush to trial” that would violate his constitutional rights and be “flatly impossible” given the extraordinary volume of discovery evidence they will have to sort through. Trump’s lawyers wrote:
      The government’s objective is clear: to deny President Trump and his counsel a fair ability to prepare for trial.
      Special counsel Jack Smith is expected to oppose the April 2026 start date, which would put the trial long after the 2024 presidential election, in which Trump is the current frontrunner for the Republican nomination. US district court judge Tanya Chutkan has said she wants to set a trial date at her next scheduled hearing on 28 August.Meanwhile, Joe Biden will welcome his South Korean counterpart, Yoon Suk Yeol, and Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, to Camp David today for the first-ever trilateral summit with the three countries, as the US hopes to cement ties with its two most important allies in Asia amid an increasingly assertive China and a nuclear-armed North Korea.Washington’s ties with Tokyo and Seoul are “stronger than they have been at any point in modern memory”, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at a Friday briefing, as he confirmed the US will announce “significant steps to enhance trilateral security cooperation” including new collaborations on missile defence and technology when the three leaders meet for their first standalone summit.Here’s what else we’re watching today:
      11am: Joe Biden will welcome the South Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, and Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, to Camp David for a trilateral summit.
      3pm: Biden, Yoon and Kishida will hold a joint press conference.
      6pm: Biden will leave Camp David for Andrews, where he will fly to Reno
      The House and Senate are out. More

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      in US Politics

      Georgia Republican lawmaker moves to impeach Trump prosecutor Fani Willis

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      A Republican state senator in Georgia has moved to impeach the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis.The move comes in the wake of Willis’s delivery of a 41-count indictment against the former president Donald Trump and his operatives on state racketeering and conspiracy charges over efforts to reverse Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss in the state.On Thursday, Colton Moore wrote a letter to Governor Brian Kemp in which he called for an emergency review of Willis’s actions.“We, the undersigned … hereby certify to you … that in our opinion an emergency exists in the affairs of the state, requiring a special session to be convened … for all purposes, to include, without limitation, the review and response to the actions of Fani Willis,” Moore wrote.Moore, who represents senate district 53, posted his letter on Twitter alongside the caption: “As a Georgia state senator, I am officially calling for an emergency session to review the actions of Fani Willis.“America is under attack. I’m not going to sit back and watch as radical left prosecutors politically TARGET political opponents,” he added.In a statement reported by the rightwing media outlet Breitbart, Moore said: “We must strip all funding and, if appropriate, impeach Fani Willis.”Moore appears to have also launched a website for the official petition of Willis.“Corrupt district attorney Fani Willis is potentially abusing her position of power by pursuing former president Donald J Trump, and I am calling on my colleagues in the Georgia legislature to join me in calling for an emergency session to investigate and review her actions and determine if they warrant impeachment.“The politically motivated weaponization of our justice system at the expense of taxpayers will not be tolerated. I am demanding that we defund her office until we find out what the hell is going on. We cannot stand idly by as corrupt prosecutors choose to target their political opposition,” the website read underneath a headline of “God. Guns. Liberty. Leadership.”Moore’s announcement triggered praise from several conservatives online, with one person writing: “Finally a Republican with courage. So refreshing to see someone FIGHT instead of sit back and say ‘there’s nothing we can do.’”Another user wrote: “Finally, a Republican with a backbone.”“Republicans who walk the walk are my kind of Republicans,” someone else wrote.Following Willis’s delivery of the 41-count indictment, the Fulton county district attorney, who is African American, has faced a wave of racist abuse online including from Trump, who, using a thinly veiled play on the N-word, wrote on Truth Social: “They never went after those that Rigged the Election … They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!” More

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      in Elections

      Trump’s latest indictment leads to fears of rise in calls for violence – live

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      After news broke on Monday night of Donald Trump’s indictment in Fulton county, Georgia, attention quickly turned to the possible spectacle of a trial unfolding on television as a former president attempts to rebut charges of racketeering and conspiracy over his efforts to overturn the results of an election.But before the district attorney Fani Willis can have the opportunity to make her case against Trump with the cameras rolling, she must first clear a key procedural hurdle to keep the case in Fulton county.Trump’s legal team is expected to rely on a little known legal statute to argue the case should be moved to federal court, and that jurisdictional question could delay a trial for months. The stakes of that procedural fight will be high, as a conviction in Fulton county would leave Trump facing years of prison time with no clear pathway to a pardon.Read the full story here.Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, dismissed the suggestion that she is running in the 2024 GOP presidential race in order to become the vice president.In an interview with Politico, Haley said:
      I think everybody that says, ‘She’s doing this to be vice president,’ needs to understand I don’t run for second.
      That’s something that I hear all the time, and I’ll tell you that, look, we have a country to save, and I don’t trust anybody else to do it.
      Donald Trump’s legal advisers have urged the former president not to hold a press conference next week in response to his latest indictment, according to an ABC report. Trump announced in a Truth Social post on Tuesday that he would present a “report” to refute the allegations in the indictment handed up by the Fulton country district attorney’s office from his home in Bedminster, New Jersey.But the press conference, originally scheduled for 11am Monday, is now very much in doubt, multiple sources told ABC.
      Sources tell ABC News that Trump’s legal advisers have told him that holding such a press conference with dubious claims of voter fraud will only complicate his legal problems and some of his attorneys have advised him to cancel it.
      The names, photographs and home addresses purportedly belonging to members of the Fulton county grand jury that indicted Donald Trump and 18 of his co-defendants this week are circulating on social media.The grand jurors’ purported addresses were posted on a fringe website that often features violent rhetoric, NBC reported on Wednesday.The indictment issued on Monday includes the names of all the grand jurors who served on the 26-member panel in Fulton county, but not their addresses or other personal information.Websites where the purported photographs, social media profiles and home addresses of the grand jurors included pro-Trump forums and sites that have previously been linked to violent extremist attacks, according to a CNN report. In some cases, users have posted social media profiles of different people who have the same name as some of the grand jurors, while some addresses appear to be wrong, the report said.The rightwing extremist Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has not made up her mind about running for Senate in Georgia – in part because she hopes to be Donald Trump’s vice-president.“I haven’t made up my mind whether I will do that or not,” Greene told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, about a rumoured challenge to the current governor, Brian Kemp, in a Georgia Senate primary in 2026.
      I have a lot of things to think about. Am I going to be a part of President Trump’s cabinet if he wins? Is it possible that I’ll be VP?
      Despite a string of controversies over voicing conspiracy theories, aggressive behaviour towards Democrats and progressives and recent squabbling with her fellow House extremist Lauren Boebert, and despite being “kicked out” of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, Greene remains influential in Republican ranks, close to the speaker, Kevin McCarthy.She told the AJC she would consider it an “honour” to be picked as Trump’s running mate to take on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris next year. She would consider such an offer “very, very heavily”, she said.Trump has encouraged Greene to harbour higher ambitions, saying in March he would “fight like hell” for her if she ran for Senate.Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, has personally appealed to the former president to pay his ballooning legal bills, according to a CNN report. The former New York mayor traveled to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in late April, along with his lawyer Robert Costello, where they had two meetings with Trump to discuss Giuliani’s seven-figure legal fees, the report said, citing a source.Giuliani and Costello made several pitches about how paying Giuliani’s bills was ultimately in Trump’s best interest, but the former president did not seem interested, the source said.The source said Trump verbally agreed to help with some of Giuliani’s bills but did not commit to any specific amount or timeline. He also agreed to attend two fundraisers for Giuliani, a separate source said.Giuliani is facing hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills and sanctions amid numerous lawsuits related to his work for Trump after the 2020 election.Calls to violence have proliferated across far-right sites since the charges against Donald Trump in the 2020 Georgia election subversion case were made public on Monday night.The former president’s allusion to the racial slur was immediately picked up by his supporters on far-right platforms including Gab and Patriots.win. Several Gab posts reproduced images of nooses and gallows and called for Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis and grand jurors who delivered the charges to be hanged. And posts on Patriots.win combined the wordplay with direct calls to violence.Earlier this month, Willis wrote to Fulton county commissioners and judges to warn them to stay vigilant in the face of rising tensions ahead of the release of the indictment. She told them that she and her staff had been receiving racist threats and voicemails since she began her investigation into Trump’s attempt to subvert the election two years ago.
      I guess I am sending this as a reminder that you should stay alert over the month of August and stay safe.
      As Willis’s investigation approached its climax, Trump intensified his personal attacks on her through social media. He has accused her of prosecutorial misconduct and even of being racist herself.Willis, who on Wednesday said she wants to take the case to trial in March 2024, has rebuffed Trump’s claims as “derogatory and false”.Trump has also unleashed a barrage of vitriol against Jack Smith, the special counsel who earlier this month brought four federal charges against Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump has referred to the prosecutor, who is white, as “Deranged Jack Smith”.Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia who is prosecuting Donald Trump and 18 other allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is facing a flurry of racist online abuse after the former president attacked his opponents using the word “riggers”, a thinly veiled play on the N-word.Hours after Willis had released the indictments on Monday night, Trump went on his social media platform Truth Social calling for all charges to be dropped and predicting he would be exonerated. He did not mention Willis by name, but accused prosecutors of pursuing the wrong criminal targets.“They never went after those that Rigged the Election,” Trump wrote.
      They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!
      Willis is African American. So too are the two New York-based prosecutors who have investigated Trump, the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg who indicted him in April over alleged hush-money payments, and Letitia James, the state attorney general who is investigating Trump’s financial records.Trump’s allusion to the racial slur was immediately picked up by his supporters on far-right platforms including Gab and Patriots.win. The sites hosted hundreds of posts featuring “riggers” in their headlines in a disparaging context.The word has also been attached to numerous social media posts to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. The two Black poll workers from Atlanta were falsely accused by some of the 19 defendants in the Fulton county case of committing election fraud during the 2020 vote count, and the indictment accuses Trump allies of harassing them.US district judge Tanya Chutkan, who overseeing Donald Trump’s 2020 election subversion case, warned the former president last week to refrain from making statements that could intimidate witnesses or prejudice potential jurors.Just a day before Abigail Jo Shry allegedly left a voicemail message threatening to kill Chutkan, Trump had posted on his social media platform, Truth Social: writing “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!”Trump has specifically posted about Chutkan since she was randomly assigned to oversee his 2020 election case. On Monday, the former president said she “obviously wants me behind bars” and described her as “very biased and unfair”.Chutkan has reportedly been assigned extra security by the US marshals service in recent weeks, and CNN reported observing more security detailed to the judge around the Washington DC federal courthouse.A Texas woman was arrested on charges that she threatened to kill US district judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the prosecution of former president Donald Trump on allegations that he tried to overturn the 2020 election.Abigail Jo Shry, 43, of Alvin, Texas, called the federal courthouse in Washington DC on 5 August and left the threatening voicemail message, using a racist slur, according to court documents.In the call, Shry told the judge: “You are in our sights, we want to kill you,” according to the documents. Prosecutors allege Shry also said: “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you.”Investigators traced the phone number and Shry later admitted to making the threatening call, according to a criminal complaint.Shry is charged with Transmission in Interstate or Foreign Commerce of any Communication Containing a Threat to Injure the Person of Another. She is being held in detention pending trial, according to court documents, and a bond hearing has been set for 13 September.Good morning, US politics blog readers. A Texas woman has been charged with threatening to kill the federal judge presiding over former president Donald Trump’s criminal case in Washington DC over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.Abigail Jo Shry, 43, left a voicemail at US district judge Tanya Chutkan’s chambers on 5 August in which she used a racial slur and threatened her, saying “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly, bitch”, according to a court document. She also allegedly threatened to kill “all democrats in Washington DC and all people in the LGBTQ community”, according to the court filing.On the day before the threatening phone call, Trump had posted on his social media platform, Truth Social: “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!” The former president has intensified attacks against those individuals involved in the many indictment against him, including Chutkan and Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney who is prosecuting him over efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.Hours after Willis had released the indictments on Monday night, Trump accused prosecutors of pursuing the wrong criminal targets using the word “riggers”, a thinly veiled play on the N-word. Trump’s allusion to the racial slur was immediately picked up by his supporters on far-right platforms, and Willis – who is African American – has faced a flurry of racist online abuse.Calls to violence have proliferated across far-right sites since the charges were made public on Monday night. The purported names and addresses of members of the Georgia grand jury that indicted Trump and 18 of his allies were posted on a fringe website that often features violent rhetoric, NBC News reported.Here’s what else we’re watching today:
      10am Eastern time: President Joe Biden will get his daily intelligence briefing.
      11.25am: Biden will leave for Andrews, where he will fly to the Wilkes-Barre Scranton Airport.
      12.35pm: Biden will travel to Avoca, Pennsylvania, where he will pay respects to the state’s former first lady Ellen Casey in advance of a viewing.
      2.10pm: Biden will fly to Hagerstown, Maryland, for Camp David.
      The House and Senate are out. More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene floats Senate run but hopes to be Trump’s vice-president

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      The rightwing extremist Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has not made up her mind about running for Senate in Georgia – in part because she hopes to be Donald Trump’s vice-president.“I haven’t made up my mind whether I will do that or not,” Greene told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, about a rumoured challenge to the current governor, Brian Kemp, in a Georgia Senate primary in 2026.“I have a lot of things to think about. Am I going to be a part of President Trump’s cabinet if he wins? Is it possible that I’ll be VP?”Trump faces 91 criminal charges – 13 of them in Georgia, over attempted election subversion – but nonetheless dominates polling for the Republican presidential nomination, nationally and in key states.Despite a string of controversies over voicing conspiracy theories, aggressive behaviour towards Democrats and progressives and recent squabbling with her fellow House extremist Lauren Boebert, and despite being “kicked out” of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, Greene remains influential in Republican ranks, close to the speaker, Kevin McCarthy.She told the AJC she would consider it an “honour” to be picked as Trump’s running mate to take on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris next year.She would consider such an offer “very, very heavily”, she said.Trump has encouraged Greene to harbour higher ambitions, saying in March he would “fight like hell” for her if she ran for Senate.Kemp is reported to be considering a run for Senate in 2026. On Wednesday, Greene rebuked Kemp for his own rebuke of Trump.Earlier this week, Trump and 18 allies were indicted in Georgia on charges including racketeering and conspiracy, regarding the attempt to overturn Trump’s defeat by Biden.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn response, Kemp said: “The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen. For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward – under oath – and prove anything in a court of law.”Greene told the AJC: “His message should have been against this, not arguing with President Trump about the election and making it about his own ego and pride over Georgia’s election. That’s a bad statement, and I was very upset over it.”Trump did not immediately comment about Greene’s wish to be vice-president. More

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      Biden says landmark climate bill is winning against special interests – as it happened

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      From 2h agoPresident Joe Biden has started his speech marking the first anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, which he described as “one of the most significant laws … of taking on a special interest and winning”.Biden begins thanking Vice-President Kamala Harris and members of Congress who played a “pivotal” role in getting the bill passed. “Everyone was telling us there’s no possibility with the divided Congress the way it was,” he said.Here’s a recap of today’s developments:
      President Joe Biden used the first anniversary of his signature Inflation Reduction Act to pitch the landmark clean-energy law as an economic powerhouse to an American public that remains largely unaware of its contents. Speaking at a White House ceremony, Biden said the legislation has already created 170,000 clean energy jobs and will create some 1.5m jobs over the next decade, while significantly cutting the nation’s carbon emissions.
      Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Maui on Monday to survey damage from the deadly wildfires that ravaged the resort town of Lahaina last week. The Bidens will meet with survivors of the fires, as well as first responders and other government officials, the White House said.
      Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia who is prosecuting Donald Trump and 18 other allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has proposed a trial commencement date of 4 March 2024 for Trump and his 18 co-defendants. That would have Trump in court mid-campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
      Willis is facing a flurry of racist online abuse after the former president attacked his opponents using the word “riggers”, a thinly veiled play on the N-word. Calls to violence have proliferated across far-right sites since the charges against Trump in the Georgia case were made public on Monday night.
      Former vice-president Mike Pence said the Georgia election was not stolen in 2020 and that “no one is above the law” after Trump was indicted in the state’s election subversion case. Pence’s remarks were his first since the indictment was handed down on Monday, and mark a new full-court press in recent days surrounding his certification of the 2020 election results.
      Trump’s dubious defense that he was exercising his free-speech rights in response to a four-count federal criminal indictment charging him with pushing illegal schemes to overturn his 2020 election loss is prompting ex-Department of Justice officials and scholars to criticize such claims as bogus and as threats to the rule of law.
      Special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election obtained a trove of direct messages that the former president sent to others privately through his Twitter account, according to newly unsealed court documents. A court filing last week showed federal prosecutors obtained a search warrant in January directing Twitter to produce “data and records” related to Trump’s Twitter account as well as a non-disclosure agreement prohibiting Twitter from disclosing the search warrant. The social media platform delayed complying, prompting a federal judge to hold Twitter in contempt and fine it $350,000, the filing showed.
      Americans are deeply divided along party lines in their views of Trump’s actions in the most recent criminal cases brought against him, according to a new poll.
      We reported earlier that the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has proposed that Donald Trump’s trial on election interference charges start on 4 March 2024.Willis’s suggested date is just one day before Super Tuesday, when 15 states are scheduled to hold primaries or caucuses to select their 2024 candidates.Willis submitted her recommendation in a court filing which also requested arraignment for the defendants charged in the Georgia election case to take place during the week of 5 September.Trump is set to be on trial in New York on 25 March 2024 on separate charges connected to a $130,000 payment he made to Stormy Daniels, a porn star, with whom he is alleged to have had an extramarital affair.He is also set to go on trial in Florida in May on charges of retaining classified documents after leaving office.The US has faced some tough times in recent years, Biden says. Despite this, he says the economy is stronger and better than any other industrial nation in the world right now.He accuses Republicans of having repeatedly tried to repeal key parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, and of taking credit for private investments and the jobs coming into their states. “That’s OK,” he says. “I’m proud of the historic law my administration passed, but it’s not about me. It’s about you.”
      Bidenomics is just another way of saying restore the American dream.
      Biden says the US is investing more than $50bn to build up resilience to the impacts of climate change. He vows to cut carbon pollution by half by 2030.The Inflation Reduction Act is helping families save thousands of dollars in energy bills every year, he says. Consumers will save an estimated $27bn in electric bills between now and 2030, he says.
      When I say climate means jobs, I mean good paying union jobs.
      Biden says his administration is also boosting the nation’s energy security after years in which China dominated the clean energy supply chains.He says the time is over in which the answer has been to find the cheapest labor, and then to import the product from abroad. “Not any more,” he says. “We are building it here and sending the product over here.”The Inflation Reduction Act is projected to help triple wind power and increase solar power eightfold by 2030, he says.Biden says the Inflation Reduction Act is bringing jobs back to the US.
      We’re leaving nobody behind. We’re investing in all of America, in the heartland and coast to coast.
      The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has proposed a trial commencement date of 4 March 2024 for Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case.Willis also asked to schedule arraignments for the defendants for the week of 5 September, according to a court filing.Biden says more jobs have been created in the two years since he took office than any administration has in a single four-year term.The US has more jobs than before the pandemic, he says, and workers are finding better, higher-paying and higher-satisfaction jobs.Meanwhile, unemployment and inflation are down, he says. He attributes inflation falling to “corporate profits coming back down to earth”.President Joe Biden has started his speech marking the first anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, which he described as “one of the most significant laws … of taking on a special interest and winning”.Biden begins thanking Vice-President Kamala Harris and members of Congress who played a “pivotal” role in getting the bill passed. “Everyone was telling us there’s no possibility with the divided Congress the way it was,” he said.As we wait for Joe Biden to take the stage, here is some lunchtime reading on the Georgia election investigation.As part of Georgia district attorney Fani Willis’s delivery of a 41-count indictment against former president Donald Trump and 18 others, the racketeering charge also lists 30 “unindicted co-conspirators”.Here is the Guardian’s explainer on those individuals and their involvement in the alleged 2020 presidential election fraud:President Joe Biden is set to deliver an address at approximately 2.30pm on the anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act.We will bring you the latest updates of Biden’s remarks.It is the nature of conspiracy theories to turn tragedy into grist, to transform grief and human suffering into an abstract game. The latest horrifying example came out of news late July that Barack Obama’s chef Tafari Campbell had drowned in the waters off Martha’s Vineyard.What was a terrible accident and a tragic loss for Campbell’s family and friends was almost immediately seized upon by the paranoid corners of the internet as proof that somehow Barack and Michelle Obama had been involved in an assassination.It was not the first time that conspiracists have seized on a senseless death as proof of a deeper plot: the 1993 suicide of Vince Foster, lawyer in the Clinton White House, and the murder of the DNC staffer Seth Rich during the 2016 presidential campaign were both used as proof of a “Clinton body count” by the right wing, a playbook that was immediately resurrected as news of Campbell’s death broke. The difference was that those earlier conspiracy theories were focused almost entirely on the Clintons, while the current iteration is far more diffuse and its targets far more wide-reaching.Campbell’s death, these conspiracists claim, is not just proof of the Obamas’ criminality but of a massive network of treasonous child sex traffickers – an elaborate and convoluted narrative all too well known to us now as QAnon. QAnon appeared in 2017 and quickly spread through the far right, before beginning to wane in the wake of Joe Biden’s inauguration.But it hasn’t disappeared entirely, and understanding the conspiracy theory’s rise and fall – and the awful legacy it has left us – reveals a great deal about the modern landscape of partisan paranoia. It also offers some clues on how best to fight back.Read the full story here.Donald Trump is testing the limits of what the federal judge presiding over his 2020 election subversion case will tolerate after warning the former president against making inflammatory remarks.US district court judge Tanya Chutkan last week admonished Trump against violating the conditions of his release put in place at his arraignment, warning that inflammatory remarks from the former president would push her to schedule the trial sooner.Trump immediately tested that warning by posting on Truth Social messages that largely amplified others criticizing Chutkan. “She obviously wants me behind bars. VERY BIASED & UNFAIR,” Trump wrote on Monday.Trump has waged a similarly defiant campaign against others involved in criminal cases against him, including special counsel Jack Smith and Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis, the New York Times reported.
      Some lawyers have said that if Mr. Trump were an ordinary citizen issuing these attacks, he would be in jail by now. The question is whether Mr. Trump will face consequences for this kind of behavior ahead of a trial.
      ‘He is absolutely in my view testing the judge and testing the limits, almost daring and taunting her,’ said Karen Agnifilo, who has a three-decade legal career, including as the chief assistant in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Ms. Agnifilo added that Mr. Trump is so far benefiting from his status as a candidate for office, facing fewer repercussions from the judges in the cases than other vocal defendants might.
      Trump could be found in violation of the conditions of his release, which could entail a fine or even being sent to jail, the report writes.Calls to violence have proliferated across far-right sites since the charges against Donald Trump in the Georgia case were made public on Monday night.Several Gab posts reproduced images of nooses and gallows and called for Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia, and grand jurors who delivered the charges to be hanged. And posts on Patriots.win combined the wordplay with direct calls to violence.Earlier this month, Willis wrote to Fulton county commissioners and judges to warn them to stay vigilant in the face of rising tensions ahead of the release of the indictment. She told them that she and her staff had been receiving racist threats and voicemails since she began her investigation into Trump’s attempt to subvert the election two years ago. She said:
      I guess I am sending this as a reminder that you should stay alert over the month of August and stay safe.
      As Willis’s investigation approached its climax, Trump intensified his personal attacks on her through social media. He has accused her of prosecutorial misconduct and even of being racist herself.Willis has rebuffed his claims as “derogatory and false”.Trump has also unleashed a barrage of vitriol against Jack Smith, the special counsel who earlier this month brought four federal charges against Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump has referred to the prosecutor, who is white, as “Deranged Jack Smith”.The judge in the federal case, Tanya Chutkan, has warned him to be careful not to make inflammatory public comments about the proceedings, saying she would “take whatever measures are necessary” to prevent intimidation of witnesses or contamination of the jury pool.Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia who is prosecuting Donald Trump and 18 other allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is facing a flurry of racist online abuse after the former president attacked his opponents using the word “riggers”, a thinly veiled play on the N-word.Hours after Willis had released the indictments on Monday night, Trump went on his social media platform Truth Social calling for all charges to be dropped and predicting he would exonerated. He did not mention Willis by name, but accused prosecutors of pursuing the wrong criminal targets.“They never went after those that Rigged the Election,” Trump wrote.
      They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!
      Willis is African American. So too are the two New York-based prosecutors who have investigated Trump, the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg who indicted him in April over alleged hush-money payments, and Letitia James, the state attorney general who is investigating Trump’s financial records.Trump’s allusion to the racial slur was immediately picked up by his supporters on far-right platforms including Gab and Patriots.win. The sites hosted hundreds of posts featuring “riggers” in their headlines in a disparaging context.The word has also been attached to numerous social media posts to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. The two Black poll workers from Atlanta were falsely accused by some of the 19 defendants in the Fulton county case of committing election fraud during the 2020 vote count, and the indictment accuses Trump allies of harassing them.The attorney representing Donald Trump in his Georgia case once donated to the campaign of Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney who filed charges against the former president on Monday.Drew Findling, who is on the team of lead Trump attorneys fighting against Rico charges in Georgia, has backed several Democrats, including donating $1,440 to Willis’ successful primary campaign in July 2020, Federal Election Commission records obtained by Rolling Stone reveal.Findling also donated $8,400 to Joe Biden’s winning campaign, records show.Findling is an attorney who has represented rap artists like Gucci Mane, Migos and Cardi B. He also has tweeted critically of Trump, calling him in 2018 “the racist architect of fraudulent Trump University”. More

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      Democrat calls McCarthy ‘pathetic and shameful’ for protecting Santos after aide charged

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      A senior Democrat called Kevin McCarthy “pathetic and shameful” on Wednesday, for continuing to protect George Santos even as a staffer to the fabulist Republican congressman faced charges for impersonating the House speaker’s own chief of staff.Daniel Goldman of New York said: “According to a federal indictment, George Santos paid someone to impersonate Kevin McCarthy’s chief of staff to raise money, yet McCarthy continues to protect Santos.“Pathetic and shameful.”The indictment of Samuel Miele on four counts of wire fraud and one of aggravated identity theft was issued in the same New York court where in May Santos pleaded not guilty to charges including fraud, theft and money laundering, CNBC reported.Miele did not immediately comment.Santos was elected to his New York seat last November. He was soon found to have fabricated most of his résumé and to be under investigation in multiple jurisdictions for alleged misdeeds including campaign finance violations, dubious business schemes and sexual harassment.McCarthy removed Santos from committee assignments but otherwise refused to move against a congressman who backed him through 15 votes for speaker, saying investigations should run their course.In May, Republicans dodged a Democratic attempt to make Santos only the sixth member ever expelled from the House. Santos, who has admitted “embellishing” his résumé but denies wrongdoing, is running for re-election next year.CNBC first reported Miele’s impersonation of a senior McCarthy staffer, saying he called “wealthy donors” during the 2020 and 2022 election cycles, identifying himself as Dan Meyer.In that report, in January, CNBC said: “The impersonation of the top House Republican’s chief of staff adds to an emerging picture of a winning congressional campaign propelled by fabrications and questionable tactics.”Since then, almost every aspect of Santos’s political career, even his real name, has been brought into question.Republicans under McCarthy control the House by just five seats, making Santos’s seat a key target for Democrats.Goldman, a former prosecutor and lead counsel to the first impeachment of Donald Trump, has worked with another New York Democrat, Ritchie Torres, to keep Santos in the spotlight.In remarks on the House floor in June, Goldman told Republicans: “You are the party of George Santos.“… The guy is an alleged and acknowledged liar and indicted, and you protect him every day … It’s pathetic, and it’s beneath you and it’s beneath this body.” More

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      Trump prosecutor Fani Willis faces racist abuse after indicting ex-US president

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      Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia who is prosecuting Donald Trump and 18 other allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is facing a flurry of racist online abuse after the former president attacked his opponents using the word “riggers”, a thinly veiled play on the N-word.Hours after Willis had released the indictments on Monday night, Trump went on his social media platform Truth Social calling for all charges to be dropped and predicting he would exonerated. He did not mention Willis by name, but accused prosecutors of pursuing the wrong criminal targets.“They never went after those that Rigged the Election,” Trump wrote. “They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!”Willis is African American. So too are the two New York-based prosecutors who have investigated Trump, the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg who indicted him in April over alleged hush-money payments, and Letitia James, the state attorney general who is investigating Trump’s financial records.Trump’s allusion to the racial slur was immediately picked up by his supporters on far-right platforms including Gab and Patriots.win. The sites hosted hundreds of posts featuring “riggers” in their headlines in a disparaging context.The word has also been attached to numerous social media posts to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. The two Black poll workers from Atlanta were falsely accused by some of the 19 defendants in the Fulton county case of committing election fraud during the 2020 vote count, and the indictment accuses Trump allies of harassing them.Calls to violence have proliferated across far-right sites since the charges were made public on Monday night. Several Gab posts reproduced images of nooses and gallows and called for Willis and grand jurors who delivered the charges to be hanged. And posts on Patriots.win combined the wordplay with direct calls to violence.Earlier this month, Willis wrote to Fulton county commissioners and judges to warn them to stay vigilant in the face of rising tensions ahead of the release of the indictment. She told them that she and her staff had been receiving racist threats and voicemails since she began her investigation into Trump’s attempt to subvert the election two years ago.“I guess I am sending this as a reminder that you should stay alert over the month of August and stay safe,” she said.As Willis’s investigation approached its climax, Trump intensified his personal attacks on her through social media. He has accused her of prosecutorial misconduct and even of being racist herself.Willis has rebuffed his claims as “derogatory and false”.Trump has also unleashed a barrage of vitriol against Jack Smith, the special counsel who earlier this month brought four federal charges against Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump has referred to the prosecutor, who is white, as “Deranged Jack Smith”.The judge in the federal case, Tanya Chutkan, has warned him to be careful not to make inflammatory public comments about the proceedings, saying she would “take whatever measures are necessary” to prevent intimidation of witnesses or contamination of the jury pool. More

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      Florida’s attacks on academic freedom just got even worse | Moira Donegan

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      Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign is flailing: the Florida governor, once considered a formidable contestant for the Republican nomination, is polling at a pathetic 14.8% among the Republican contenders. His camp is struggling to raise money, and the candidate’s public appearances have revealed him to be interpersonally unpleasant – coming off stiff, judgmental and creepy.At the Iowa state fair last week, DeSantis was caught on video telling a little girl, who was clutching a fairground treat, “that’s probably a lot of sugar”. The governor, a man so joyless that he scolded a child for eating candy, was later the subject of a taunting banner flown over one of his events: “Be Likable, Ron!”But just because DeSantis will not become president doesn’t mean that his constituents in Florida will be relieved of the policies he put in place there while trying to draw national attention to himself. In a years-long campaign that now seems destined to end with a third-place finish in Iowa, DeSantis reshaped Florida in his image, pursuing culture-war fights that he hoped would grab media attention and convince Republican primary voters that he was hurting their most hated enemies.Among these was the seizure and restructuring of New College of Florida, a public liberal arts college in Sarasota that was long known in the state for its curious students, eclectic faculty and countercultural bent. DeSantis overhauled the college’s board of trustees, appointing his own loyalists. The man newly in charge of New College is Christopher Rufo, a rightwing influencer known for whipping up moral panics. He’s been given a mandate to make the school conservative, bringing the curriculum in line with the governor’s ideological preferences, and reshaping it in the image of Hillsdale College, a private conservative Christian school in Michigan.Now Rufo has escalated his attacks on New College, transforming a board of trustees meeting into an ideologically driven attack on academic freedom – and eliminating the school’s gender studies department.Last Thursday’s trustees meeting was supposed to be mostly about the college’s quest to hire a new president: three far-right candidates were interviewed earlier that day. The meetings were already tense. New College’s students and faculty, along with staff, alumni and many ordinary Floridians, are appalled at what is being done to the school. The candidate interviews were livestreamed, but they had to be conducted in a secure separate building, cordoned off by police tape. When the board met in public in front of an audience, the proceedings became so contentious that four different onlookers were removed by police.For his part, Rufo seems to be courting this controversy. Like DeSantis, his is a politics of contempt, made up largely of sneering attempts to elicit an outraged reaction from his victims. At the board meeting, he brought up the proposal to eliminate gender studies abruptly, without advance notice to the full board, and without allowing any time for public comment. When student and faculty trustees – including Grace Keenan, the student body president, and Amy Reid, the director of the gender studies program – pointed out that the proposal violated procedures required by Florida state law, Rufo, who appeared at the meeting on Zoom, bulldozed through anyway. When Reid spoke movingly in defense of her program and its importance to students, Rufo could be seen in mute on the projector screen above her, laughing.Rufo’s own plans for the school are vague. Earlier in the meeting, he and his fellow DeSantis appointees had voted to overhaul the college’s course load, so as to require students to take courses in fields he designated using the Greek words “logos” and “technos”. It’s unclear what these terms are supposed to signify, or how exactly Rufo is translating them: “logos” is often interpreted as “word” but “technos” can mean either “technology”, “art” or “skill”. But perhaps the old-timeyness of the ancient Greek is all that Rufo is really going for: like much of the modern right, and indeed like DeSantis himself, he is solemn only in his style, and merely peevishly cruel in his substance.More to the point might be the fact that the end of New College’s gender studies department mirrors the broader project of Rufo’s boss, the terminally unlikable Ron. DeSantis has long been modeling his governorship of Florida on the rule of the autocratic Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, a darling of the American right who hosted 2023’s Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC. DeSantis’s “don’t say gay” ban on LGBTQ+ content in instruction for K-12 students was an imitation of an Orban-backed law banning “gay propaganda” anywhere minors might see it; the destruction of the gender studies program at New College follows Orban’s ban on gender studies programs in 2018.But DeSantis’s attacks on education go beyond the strictly defined gender studies field. Florida’s 2023 high school social studies curriculum advances the insultingly reductive lie that “slaves developed skills” that could be used “for personal benefit”. The attempt is to twist historical fact to legitimize a brutal and unjust racial hierarchy, and the same could be said of DeSantis’s attack on gender studies: to render natural and right what is in fact unnatural, constructed and violent.For his part, Rufo framed the attack on gender studies at New College in flippant, even blase terms: “The best universities, when they have programs that do not fit in with the mission … make hard calls to discontinue those programs.”Thanks to Rufo, New College is no longer among Florida’s best universities. And the “mission” Rufo was assigned to pursue there had less to do with scholarly integrity than with DeSantis’s culture-war fight-picking and presidential aspirations. It is a mission that is doomed to fail. Students and faculty at New College, however, are the ones who will suffer the consequences.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More