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      Birchers review: how the Republican far right gave us Trump and DeSantis

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      Out of sight but not forgotten, the John Birch Society is a husk of its old self. Still, its penchant for conspiracy theories courses in the veins of the American right. A mere 37% of Republicans believe Joe Biden beat Donald Trump legitimately. “January 6, I think, is probably second only to the 2020 election as the biggest scam in my lifetime,” says Tucker Carlson, the face of Fox News.Back in the day, the society trashed Dwight D Eisenhower and his successor as president, John F Kennedy. That Ike and JFK were war heroes made no difference. They were suspect. Eisenhower attempted to navigate around the Birchers. Kennedy used them as a foil. Dallas, where JFK was assassinated, was a Bircher hotbed.“Birchers charged that President Eisenhower abetted the communists, distributed flyers calling President John F Kennedy a traitor, and repudiated Nato,” Matthew Dallek writes in his in-depth examination of the society’s rise, fall and continued relevance.Dallek, a professor at George Washington University, is the son of Robert Dallek, a legendary presidential biographer. Under the subtitle How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, Dallek’s book is quick-paced and well researched. However troubling, it is a joy to read.Dallek argues convincingly that despite the end of the cold war, amid which the Birchers were born, its antipathies and suspicions continue to animate and inflame, a reality Trump and his minions remember and Democrats forget at their peril.Dallek looks at how the Birchers’ ideas came to pollenate and populate the Republican party. It didn’t happen randomly or suddenly. The society never disappeared and nor did its ideas and resentments. The “quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq” coupled with the “financial crisis and Great Recession” breathed fresh currency into isolationism, nativism and scorn for elites.Founded in 1958, at a secret meeting in Indianapolis led by Robert Welch, the candy manufacturer, the group took its name from a missionary and intelligence officer killed in 1945 by communists in China. Birch’s Christianity and the circumstances of his death were central to the society’s message.Original members included Fred C Koch, founder of Koch Industries and father of Charles and David, the hard-right political activists and billionaire donors.“In the 1930s [Fred Koch] had helped build oil refineries, first in Stalin’s Soviet Union and then in Hitler’s Germany, and his brushes with both regimes shaped his cold war philosophy,” Dallek writes.“In the USSR, he knew people who had been purged by Stalin … In contrast, he liked what he saw when he inspected his refineries in Nazi Germany.”Fascism came with the trappings of prosperity. These days, the Koch-funded Quincy Institute takes a dim view of US and western assistance to Ukraine.The John Birch Society is now obscure yet basks in undreamed-of success. Instead of railing against fluoridated water and embracing laetrile (an apricot derivative) as a cancer cure, the Birchers’ intellectual heirs dump on the Covid vaccine, roll the dice on polio and worship ivermectin as a miracle drug.Ron DeSantis, Florida governor and Trump mini-me, is all in with his nonstop attack on modernity and vaccination. Trump no longer reminds voters of Operation Warp Speed, the great success in combating the latest plague.The mortality gap between precincts populated by red and blue America says plenty, but Republican animus to vaccine mandates appears baked in. Fringy need not mean down and out. Just look at Ginni Thomas and her husband, Clarence Thomas, the conservative supreme court justice.Ginni Thomas, a longtime far-right activist entangled in Trump’s attempt to overturn the election up to and including January 6, grew up nestled in comfort. As Dallek points out, many in the Birchers’ ranks possessed a firm foothold in the middle and upper-middle classes.“A childhood neighbor recalled that Ginni Thomas’s parents were active in a losing 1968 referendum campaign in Omaha to ban putting fluoride in the water supply,” Dallek notes.“My Republican parents, who knew them well, certainly considered them Birchers,” the journalist Kurt Andersen recalls.Dallek reminds us of the bookstores opened by the society and the role played by female Birchers. Phyllis Schlafly, the great hard-right crusader, was a Bircher as well as a Harvard grad. She opposed the Voting Rights Act, wrote Barry Goldwater’s 1964 manifesto and successfully opposed the Equal Rights Amendment.Aloise Josephine Antonia Steiner, a non-Birch conservative and the mother of William Buckley, the founder of the National Review, encouraged an acquaintance to establish a society chapter. Buckley eventually – and circuitously – came to stand against the Birchers. Welch heaped praise on his mom.Race was always near the surface. The society attacked Brown v Board of Education, the 1954 supreme court decision which held that de jure racially segregated schools were unequal and unconstitutional. The Birchers, as Dallek recounts, branded the decision “procommunist”.Even now, Brown sticks in the craw on the right. Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump supreme court appointee, refers to Brown as inviolate super-precedent but Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist and Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network both attack its underpinnings.Decisions such as Brown, they wrote after the confirmation fight over Brett Kavanaugh, another Trump-picked conservative justice, “may have been correct in their result but were decided on the basis of sociological studies rather than legal principles”.“May”? Let that sink in.Another Republican primary is upon us. Trump again leads the way. The furor over his dinner with Ye, the antisemitic recording artist formerly known as Kanye West, and Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist, recedes. DeSantis loses ground. Authenticity and charisma matter. The governor parrots Trump and Carlson on Ukraine, flip-flopping in the process.Yet no other Republican comes close. The John Birch Society is still winning big.
      Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right is published in the US by Hachette More

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      With $1.6bn at stake, Fox News is suddenly interested in freedom of the press | Margaret Sullivan

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      As it tries to defend itself against the accusation that it knowingly spread lies about the 2020 presidential election, Fox News has touted some lofty notions about the role of journalism in a democratic society.“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners,” said a recent company statement, “but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v Sullivan.”The background, of course, is that Dominion Voting Systems is seeking $1.6bn in damages from the media giant, arguing that Fox News spread damaging falsehoods purporting that the voting machine company rigged the election to defeat Donald Trump. Dominion intends to show that network representatives at the highest levels – right up to Fox News’s founder, Rupert Murdoch – knew that this was utter nonsense, that the election was valid, and that their primary concern was not truth-telling but appeasing their disappointed pro-Trump audience.Don’t get me wrong. I believe press rights belong to a wide spectrum of media organizations, whatever their political leanings.But Fox’s reliance on first amendment protections – while part of a legal strategy that may prove successful in court – is the height of hypocrisy. America’s founders believed it was essential that American citizens be well-informed about the behavior of public officials and other powerful entities, and thus be capable of self-governance.The recent revelations from court filings, however, make it clear that such a noble mission was far from top of mind at Fox, not just in the aftermath of the 2020 election but going back years.Take, for example, one of the network’s biggest stars, Sean Hannity, who ventured far outside the bounds of journalistic norms when he appeared with Trump at a 2018 campaign rally. (Fox brass, normally tolerant of their stars’ excesses, went so far as to reprimand him.)Hannity, who has stated that he’s not a journalist, has played the role of a Trump insider – even an informal adviser to Republican officials. Recall his January 2021 text message to former chief of staff Mark Meadows and Republican congressman Jim Jordan: “Guys, we have a clear path to land the plane in 9 days,” apparently referring to persuading Trump to conclude his presidency peacefully before inauguration day.“When Hannity advised the president about the ongoing insurrection he did not do so as a journalist but as an ally, a confederate, a teammate, rather than an umpire or observer,” the famed first amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams told me last year, characterizing this as “non-journalistic behavior, in fact almost the precise opposite of journalistic behavior”.And given Fox’s clear reliance on the landmark press-rights case Times v Sullivan, why haven’t its journalists grilled their new heartthrob, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, about his newsworthy desire to weaken the journalistic protection it provides?DeSantis wants the courts to revisit Times v Sullivan, but somehow this doesn’t get the attention of Fox News interviewers. His alarming views on that landmark decision, which established a higher bar for defamation lawsuits involving public figures, haven’t provoked a single challenge in his 12 Fox appearances this year, according to a Media Matters for America database.Initially, Fox even forbade its own Howard Kurtz, who hosts a weekly show on the news media, from covering the Dominion case. After Kurtz, to his credit, publicly expressed his disagreement with that prohibition, and after plenty of outside criticism followed, the bosses relented long enough last weekend to let him discuss the case and call it a test of the first amendment.Meanwhile, Fox hosts for years have urged their grievance-hungry audience to despise journalists. (Granted, over the years, Fox has sometimes filed “friend of the court” briefs in support of other media outlets.)Rants against the media are a mainstay for personalities like Laura Ingraham, who drops disparaging phrases like “leftwing media hacks” and “regime media” into her segments.But it took Tucker Carlson – the very face of Fox News – to go further in a 2021 interview, calling mainstream journalists “cringing animals not worthy of respect”.“It just makes me sick. I really hate them,” said Carlson, who more recently has been busy portraying the violent insurrection on 6 January 2021 as a largely peaceful protest or even a friendly tourist visit.Yet somehow, when it comes time to defend the network’s profit-driven willingness to circulate lies, Fox News is eager to claim solidarity with those supposedly despicable cowards. Now, you see, it’s all about journalists standing together, arm-in-arm, on the very underpinnings of American democracy.I’m all for press rights and for applying them broadly. But somehow, I don’t think this was what the founders had in mind.Fox News doesn’t deserve the second word in its name.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      ‘Let’s make these folks famous’: the leftwing push to raise 18 Republicans’ profiles

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      Juan Ciscomani. Tom Kean Jr. Brian Fitzpatrick. Marc Molinaro. David Schweikert. Brandon Williams … Many Americans would struggle to identify who these people are or what they do.They are all, in fact, Republican members of Congress. And progressive activists argue that their fate is more crucial to the future of American democracy than more high-profile rightwing political figures such as Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene.Indivisible, a leftwing political umbrella movement founded in response to Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016, has launched a campaign to unseat 18 Republican members of the House of Representatives from districts that Joe Biden won in the election of 2020.The “Unrepresentatives” initiative is based on the premise that these 18 districts – not the safe, deep red ones of Gaetz and Greene – will determine if Republicans maintain control of the US lower chamber next year. They are the “Achilles heel” of the Maga (Make America great again) House.“These are folks who are not in the headlines,” said Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, acknowledging that the sole exception is Congressman George Santos because of his outlandish lies. “But the other 17, I would guess practically no Americans have ever heard of and are not hearing of right now because they have a different pathway to re-election. They understand this. They’re not dummies.”Although the 18 are in swing districts, they are not really moderates. They are under pressure to raise money for their next election campaign. That means they have to make commitments to donors about how they will vote in Congress – which is in line with Greene and the Maga wing of the party about 95% of the time.Speaking from Austin, Texas, Levin explained: “They are basically Marjorie Taylor Greenes in how they vote. But then that gets to the third step: they’ve got to convince the constituents in their own districts that, while Congress is messed up and there’s a lot of dysfunction there, they’re normal, everyday folks who just want the best for their constituents.”“It’s tricky to do that when you have a voting record that looks like Marjorie Taylor Greene. But that is the strategy. The way you accomplish that is by keeping your head down, by not making a lot of headlines, by not advertising every vote you take that looks like Marjorie Taylor Greene’s vote.”These Republicans work hard to cultivate a low profile away from the bright lights of Fox News or other rightwing media, steering clear of hot button topics such as abortion or Maga circuses such as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).But now Levin, a former congressional staffer, intends to shine a light on them and ensure they have no hiding place.“We have a clear goal and that is: let’s make these folks famous – famous locally, specifically. Let’s make it as clear as possible to their constituents that they are in fact backing up the Maga majority.”Indivisible is coordinating groups in the battleground districts across eight states and supporting them with training, media training and public relations help, and funding for billboards and ads, props and costumes.The effort includes rapid response-style protests calling attention to Republicans’ votes and pressuring them to publicly condemn their fellow Republicans’ worst positions, highlighting such instances in local media.Levin hopes that this might sometimes persuade the 18 Republicans to flip their votes, for example on lifting the debt ceiling: six would be enough to stave off a default.“The second possible outcome is that you don’t flip their vote but everybody knows then in the district that they voted with the Magas. If you accomplish that, then they’re more easy to defeat next year because they’ll have a harder time accomplishing that last step in their re-election strategy, which is trying to convince their constituents that they are not indeed part of the Maga problem.”Democrats fared much better than widely expected in last year’s midterm elections, maintaining control of the Senate and only narrowly losing the House – even that outcome might have been avoided if only the party had not underperformed badly in New York. A third of Indivisible’s targets are in the Empire state, traditionally a Democratic stronghold.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“In New York many folks on the Democratic side played up an artificial rise in crime,” Levin recalled. “The dominant story was not how extreme these Republicans are and how they’re coming after your freedoms, your abortion rights, your schools, your community, your democracy. It was fought on an entirely different field. We fought on the field that the Republicans chose and I do think that was a mistake. That is a shame because had we taken all those Biden-won seats, there would be a Democratic trifecta right now.”Even so, Levin found plenty of grounds for optimism in the midterms as Republicans fell short of expectations and Trump-endorsed extremists were wiped out in Arizona, Pennsylvania and elsewhere. He did not approve of Democrats’ efforts to boost election deniers in Republican primaries – “playing with fire, a dangerous strategy” – but believes the 2024 landscape is propitious.“I see these 18 Democratic districts currently represented by Republicans, eminently winnable. I see a presidential contest in which the Republican party is tearing itself apart with [Florida Governor Ron] DeSantis or Trump or folks who are trying to take both of them on.“And I see a Senate map that is indisputably tougher than the presidential and the House map but one that is quite winnable. You look at the polling that we’re seeing now in Montana, in Ohio, in West Virginia, in Arizona, some of these tough seats that we’d better hold, and they look pretty darn good for us, which is why for Indivisible’s political work, our north star is retake the House, hold the Senate, hold the presidency.”Levin argues that, should Democrats replace the Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, now an independent who has defended a Senate procedural rule known as the filibuster, with challenger Ruben Gallego, they have a shot at reforming the filibuster and working towards the codification of Roe v Wade, the recently overturned supreme court ruling that enshrined a woman’s right to abortion.Biden is an important part of that equation. Levin notes that the president was widely criticised for focusing on abortion rights and democracy in his last two speeches of the midterms campaign. “He got a ton of flak for that. There were folks even on our side calling it a strategic blunder. And yet he did indeed double down on that strategy and the proof is in the pudding. It was the best midterm margins arguably in modern American history.”There is no sign of the Republican fever breaking for now. Greene has risen to prominence in the House and appears to wield influence over the speaker, Kevin McCarthy. Trump and DeSantis are racing to the right ahead of the Republican presidential primary.But Levin keeps faith in the survival of US democracy. “I do believe that the Republican party can be saved. It’s got to be drilled into their heads that as long as the Marjorie Taylor Greenes are wielding the gavel, they’re going to have at best a tenuous grip on power. That is doable.“The vast majority of Republicans were privately and publicly predicting a massive red wave in 2022. They are not dummies. The folks who look at the same numbers I look at know the reason why they lost is because, when the folks got into the voting booth, they looked at the names on the list and they thought, well, the Republicans are being driven by folks who are coming after my schools, my communities, my freedoms, abortion rights, my family, I can’t empower them.”Levin added: “Their brand is in the gutter because they’re empowering the Marjorie Taylor Greenes. They don’t currently have the latitude to kick folks like them out of the party. There’s a reason why George Santos is still a member of the House of Representatives. But if they suffer enough electoral defeats they will be forced into moderation and the dream: to have two pro-democracy parties in the Congress. We’re not there right now but I do think it’s an achievable outcome.” More

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      Trump deregulated railways and banks. He blames Biden for the fallout

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      When a fiery train derailment took place on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border last month, Donald Trump saw an opportunity. The former US president visited East Palestine, accused Joe Biden of ignoring the community – “Get over here!” – and distributed self-branded water before dropping in at a local McDonald’s.Then, when the Silicon Valley Bank last week became the second biggest bank to fail in US history, Trump again lost no time in making political capital. He predicted that Biden would go down as “the Herbert Hoover of the modrrn [sic] age” and predicted a worse economic crash than the Great Depression.Yet it was Trump himself who, as US president, rolled back regulations intended to make railways safer and banks more secure. Critics said his attacks on the Biden administration offered a preview of a disingenuous presidential election campaign to come and, not for the first time in Trump’s career, displayed a shameless double standard.“Hypocrisy, thy name is Donald Trump and he sets new standards in a whole bunch of regrettable ways,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “For his true believers, they’re going to take Trump’s word for it and, even if they don’t, it doesn’t affect their support of him.”The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on 10 March and of New York’s Signature Bank two days later sent shockwaves through the global banking industry and revived bitter memories of the financial crisis that plunged the US into recession about 15 years ago.Fearing contagion in the banking sector, the government moved to protect all the banks’ deposits, even those that exceeded the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation $250,000 limit for each individual account. The cost ran into hundreds of billions of dollars.The drama reverberated in Washington, where Trump’s criticism was followed by that of Republicans and conservative media, seeking to blame Biden-driven inflation or, improbably, to Silicon Valley Bank’s socially aware “woke” agenda. Opponents saw this as a crude attempt to deflect from the bank’s risky investments in the bond market and more systemic problems in the sector.The 2008 financial crisis, triggered by reckless lending in the housing market, led to tough bank regulations during Barack Obama’s presidency. The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act aimed to ensure that Americans’ money was safe, in part by setting up annual “stress tests” that examine how banks would perform under future economic downturns.But when Trump won election in 2016, the writing was on the wall. Biden, then outgoing vice-president, warned against efforts to undo banking regulations, telling an audience at Georgetown University: “We can’t go back to the days when financial companies take massive risks with the knowledge that a taxpayer bailout is around the corner when they fail.”But in 2018, with Trump in the White House, Congress slashed some of those protections. Republicans – and some Democrats – voted to raise the minimum threshold for banks subject to the stress tests: those with less than $250bn in assets were no longer required to take part. Many big lenders, including Silicon Valley Bank, were freed from the tightest regulatory scrutiny.Sabato commented: “The worst example is the bank situation because that is directly tied to Trump and his administration and changes made in bank regulations in 2018. Yes, some Democrats voted for it, but it was overwhelmingly supported by Republicans and by Trump who heralded it as the real solution to future bank woes.”The minority of Democrats who supported the 2018 law have denied that it can be directly tied to this month’s bank failures, although Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, was adamant: “Let’s be clear. The failure of Silicon Valley Bank is a direct result of an absurd 2018 bank deregulation bill signed by Donald Trump that I strongly opposed.”Sherrod Brown, a Democratic senator for Ohio who introduced bipartisan legislation to improve rail safety protocols, drew a parallel between the banks’ collapse to rail industry deregulation lobbying that contributed to the East Palestine train disaster. “We see aggressive lobbying like this from banks as well,” he said.Trump repealed several Barack Obama-era US Department of Transportation rules meant to improve rail safety, including one that required high-hazard cargo trains to use electronically controlled pneumatic brake technology by 2023. This rule would not have applied to the Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine – where roughly 5,000 residents had to evacuate for days – as it was not classified as a high-hazard cargo train.But the debate around the railway accident and bank failures points to a perennial divide between Democrats, who insist that some regulation is vital to a functioning capitalism, and Republicans, who have long claimed to believe in small government. Steve Bannon, an influential far-right podcaster and former White House chief strategist, framed the Trump agenda as “the deconstruction of the administrative state”.Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist, said: “The Republican party has gotten by for many years on this idea that less is better. However, we’re now learning in this country that, as America continues to mature, in some cases more is better, and more has to be how we get to better. Otherwise the mistakes can spin out of control and cause generations of people long-term damage.”Biden called on Congress to allow regulators to impose tougher penalties on the executives of failed banks while Warren and other Democrats introduced legislation to undo the 2018 law and restore the Dodd-Frank regulations. It is likely to meet stiff opposition from the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and even some moderate Democrats.Biden has also insisted that no taxpayer money will be used to resolve the current crisis, keen to avoid any perception that average Americans are “bailing out” the two banks in a way similar to the unpopular bailouts of the biggest financial firms in 2008.But Republicans running for the 2024 presidential nomination are already contending that customers will ultimately bear the costs of the government’s actions even if taxpayer funds were not directly used. Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, said: “Joe Biden is pretending this isn’t a bailout. It is.”Another potential 2024 contender, Senator Tim Scott, the top Republican on the Senate banking committee, also criticised what he called a “culture of government intervention”, arguing that it incentivises banks to continue risky behavior if they know federal agencies will ultimately rescue them.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “This is familiar ideological territory. The battle lines between liberalism and a fake conservatism appear to be playing out here. But the tragedy of the situation is that the liberals are right.“You do need government to regulate finance and, when you don’t, you get mischief making and bank failures but that point cannot be made if you’ve got Donald Trump inventing reality. He’s demonstrated that facts and position taking don’t matter. It’s an extraordinary political strategy but it’s even more devastating to our whole political system and our media that this could be allowed.”This poses a huge messaging challenge for Democrats, who after the 2008 financial crisis came up against the Tea Party, a populist movement feeding off economic and racial resentments. Long and winding explanations about the negative impacts of Trump era deregulation are a hard sell compared to the former president’s sloganeering in East Palestine.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “Once again we see that Trump is taking advantage of the Achilles’ heel of the Democratic party by telling voters that the Democrats like big government because it bails out industries and it never provides a bailout for the little guy.”Democrats’ efforts to point out that Trump was responsible for deregulation are unlikely to cut through, Schiller added.“Any time it takes more than 10 seconds to explain something, you’re done in politics. This is why Trump has catchy phrases, sound bytes. He understands that all voters see is that rich people made a bad investment and then more rich people are making sure that their money’s available to them within three days, coming off the heels of all the closures during Covid, lost business, lost income, people struggling, inflation.“Democrats don’t want to call it a bailout but it is a bailout. The high visibility of this bailout smothers anything else the Democrats are doing for the average voter. It’s a perfect issue for the Republicans. It’s not new that the Republicans will deregulate an industry and then it collapses and the Democrats have to save it. Look at American political and economic history of the last 50 years: this is exactly what happens.” More

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      Federal prosecutors warn court of potential deluge of January 6 charges – report

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      Federal prosecutors in Washington have reportedly told court officials a thousand more people could be charged in relation to the deadly January 6 Capitol attack.Matthew Graves, the US attorney in Washington DC, sent a one-page letter to the chief judge of Washington DC federal court, apprising her of the potential deluge of defendants, Bloomberg News reported.The correspondence provides details on what the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, has described as “one of the largest, most complex and most resource-intensive investigations in our history”.Graves said in the letter that justice department officials estimated that another 700 to 1,200 defendants could face charges. That would nearly double the number of criminal cases relating to January 6, Bloomberg noted.More than a thousand people have faced charges for alleged involvement in the Capitol riot. Those who attacked Congress did so at the urging of Donald Trump, seeking to thwart certification of Joe Biden’s election win.Graves said knowing how many cases would unfold was “incredibly difficult” due to the “nature and the complexity of the investigation”. The prosecutor also said he did not know the exact proportion of misdemeanor and felony cases to come but thought there would be a larger proportion of felonies, Bloomberg said.“We expect the pace of bringing new cases will increase, in an orderly fashion, over the course of the next few months,” Graves wrote. He concluded by saying prosecutors’ estimates might shift as the justice department continues to “evaluate changing resources and circumstances”.Federal charges against participants in the Capitol riot have ranged from physical violence and property destruction to seditious conspiracy.The justice department has said 326 people have faced charges for “assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers or employees, including approximately 106 individuals who have been charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer”.Some 140 police officers were assaulted. About 55 people have been charged with conspiracy, the justice department said.Of approximately 1,000 people arrested to date, 518 have pleaded guilty, with many facing jail or prison. Fifty-three people were found guilty at trial, justice department data showed.The DC federal judge, Beryl Howell, told Bloomberg the court “continues to manage its caseload and trial calendar efficiently, notwithstanding the delays occasioned by the pandemic”.“So far, the court has been able to manage the increased criminal caseload well,” said Howell, whose term concludes this week. “Should a ‘surge’ of filings occur at a later date, the court would assess what additional steps, if any, it should take.”Criminal investigations into Trump’s attempts to undermine the 2020 election continue. Trump also faces a hush money investigation in Manhattan, a criminal investigation relating to his alleged retention of classified documents, a New York civil suit over his financial dealings and a defamation trial arising from a rape allegation he denies. More

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      More than a quarter of Republicans approve of Capitol attack, poll shows

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      More than a quarter of Republicans approve of the January 6 Capitol attack, according to a new poll. More than half think the deadly riot was a form of legitimate political discourse.The Economist and YouGov survey said 27% of Republicans either strongly or somewhat approved of the riot on 6 January 2021, which Donald Trump incited in an attempt to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden.Nine deaths, including law enforcement suicides, have been linked to the attack. More than 1,000 people have been arrested and hundreds convicted.The longest sentence yet handed down is 10 years in prison, to a former New York police officer who assaulted Capitol officers. The statutory maximum sentence for seditious conspiracy, the most serious convictions yet secured, is 20 years.Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection, but acquitted. The House January 6 committee made four criminal referrals regarding Trump to the Department of Justice. The federal investigation continues.The Republican party itself has called the riot legitimate political discourse.In February 2022, a Republican National Committee resolution said Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the two Republicans on the January 6 committee, were pursuing the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse”.A Democratic committee member, Jamie Raskin, said: “The Republican party is so off the deep end now that they are describing an attempted coup and a deadly insurrection as political expression.“It is a scandal that historians will be aghast at.”More than a year later, the Economist/YouGov poll said 54% of Republicans thought rioters “participated in legitimate political discourse”. Among all voters, that total was 34%.The poll also said 8% of Republicans strongly approved of the takeover of the Capitol and 19% somewhat approved.Among all respondents, 19% approved of the riot “to stop congressional proceedings”. The figure for those who did not approve was 65%, leaving 15% “not sure”.Asked about Trump’s responsibility for the riot, 49% of Republicans said he had some, from a little to a lot. Among all voters, that figure rose 68%.Trump is running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 and leading most polls, despite facing legal jeopardy over January 6 and on many other fronts.Respondents to the Economist/YouGov poll were also asked about the decision by the Republican House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, to hand more than 40,000 hours of Capitol security footage to Tucker Carlson.The Fox News host has used the footage to show a highly partial version of events on January 6, arguing most rioters were peaceful and claiming without discernible irony the attack has been taken out of context for political purposes.McCarthy has been widely criticised. He has said other networks will have access to the footage.Among Republicans in the new poll, 61% approved of McCarthy’s decision to release the footage to Carlson and Fox News. Among all voters, 42% did.Republicans under McCarthy, including the far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, plan to stage an official visit to individuals jailed over January 6.Trump has recorded a charity single, with a choir of prisoners. More