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      Ex-Trump aide Sanders defends critical race theory ban as Arkansas governor

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      Ex-Trump aide Sanders defends critical race theory ban as Arkansas governor Sarah Sanders, a former Trump press secretary, says move is preventative and ‘to make sure we’re not indoctrinating our kids’ The new Republican governor of Arkansas, Sarah Sanders, said the move to ban critical race theory in public schools in her state was a preventative measure.“It’s incredibly important that we do things to protect the students in our state,” she told Fox News Sunday. “We have to make sure that we are not indoctrinating our kids and that these policies and these ideas never see the light of day.”The daughter of a former governor Mike Huckabee, Sanders is the first woman to govern Arkansas.She is also a graduate of the Trump White House, where she was the second of four press secretaries.Sanders made headlines this week when she kicked off her first term with a series of executive orders.One targeted critical race theory, an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society. Republicans across the US have successfully used CRT used as an electoral issue despite it not being taught in most public schools.Another Sanders order banned the use in state documents of “Latinx”, defined by one expert proponent as “a gender-neutral term to describe US residents of Latin American descent”.Such opening gambits – “hyped executive orders that looked like something important but weren’t really”, according to a columnist for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette – attracted national attention.On Sunday, echoing Republican language in other anti-CRT campaigns often fueled by anger over the 1619 Project, a New York Times series that cast US history in light of the history of slavery, Sanders insisted: “We should never teach our kids to hate America or that America is a racist and evil country [when] in fact, it should be the exact opposite.”Though Axios and other outlets responded to Sanders’ CRT order by reporting that CRT was not taught in Arkansas schools, Huckabee said: “Our job is to protect the students and we’re going to take steps every single day to make sure we do exactly that.“And that’s the reason I signed the executive order. I’m proud of the fact that we’re taking those steps and we’re going to continue to do it every single day that I’m in office.”Sanders’ host, Shannon Bream, asked if teachers in Arkansas could “still have the uncomfortable conversations about the sins of our past, about the things this country has gotten wrong”.Sanders said: “Our teachers absolutely need to teach our history but they shouldn’t teach our kids and our students ideas to hate this country and to give a false premise about who we are and what we’re about. And that is something that we have to make sure we protect our students from.”Speaking to Axios this week, Derrick Johnson, president and chief executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said: “Much of the debate around critical race theory is as much a distraction as it is a strategy.”Johnson said the NAACP believes “accurate history is the history that should be taught”.TopicsArkansasDonald TrumpUS politicsUS educationRepublicansRacenewsReuse this content More

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      Republicans accuse Biden of hypocrisy over classified documents discoveries

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      Republicans accuse Biden of hypocrisy over classified documents discoveriesHouse oversight chair requests Delaware visitor logs as Democrats stress difference from Trump classified records case Republicans pounced on the discovery on Saturday of more classified documents at Joe Biden’s residence, accusing the president of hypocrisy and questioning why the records were not brought to light earlier.There’s one winner in the Biden documents discovery: Donald TrumpRead moreBiden lawyers have discovered at least 20 classified documents at his residence outside Wilmington, Delaware, and at an office in Washington used after he left the Obama administration, in which he was vice-president.It is not yet clear what exactly the documents are, but Biden lawyers have said they immediately turned over the documents to the National Archives. This week, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, appointed a special counsel, former US attorney Robert Hur, to look into the matter.The materials are already a political headache for Biden. When the FBI raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to obtain classified material the former president kept, Biden said: “How could that possibly happen? How anyone could be that irresponsible?”On Sunday, Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican, told ABC’s This Week: “It just just reminds me of that old adage, ‘If you live in a glass house don’t throw stones.’ And I think President Biden was caught throwing stones.”James Comer of Kentucky, the new chair of the House oversight committee, told CNN’s State of the Union: “While he was doing this, he knew very well that he himself had possession of classified documents so the hypocrisy here is great.”There is no evidence Biden was aware he had the documents. His lawyers have said they were misplaced.Comer also noted Biden’s attorneys discovered the classified material on 2 November, days before the midterm elections, and questioned why the discovery hadn’t been made public earlier.“Why didn’t we hear about this on 2 November, when the first batch of classified documents were discovered?” he said.Comer has requested visitor logs for Biden’s Delaware residence from January 2021 to the present as well as additional communications about the search for documents, CNN reported.Marc Short, who was chief of staff to Mike Pence in the Trump administration, told NBC’s Meet the Press: “Why’d they hold it? Why didn’t anybody talk about it? Is it because of the midterm elections they didn’t want to interfere with?”Even though two special counsels are looking into how both Trump and Biden handled classified material, there are key differences between the cases.Trump had hundreds of classified files and rebuffed government efforts to return them. The White House has said the 20 or so Biden documents were inadvertently misplaced and turned over as soon as they were discovered.Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House oversight committee, told CNN: “We were delighted to learn that the president’s lawyers, the moment they found out about the documents that day, turned them over to the National Archives, and ultimately to the Department of Justice.“That is a very different posture than what we saw with Donald Trump. He was fighting for a period of more than eight months to not turn over hundreds of missing documents that the archives was asking about.“There are some people who are trying to compare having a government document that should no longer be in your possession to inciting a violent insurrection against the government of the United States,” Raskin added, referring to the 6 January 2021 attack on Congress Trump incited after losing the 2020 election to Biden.“And those are obviously completely different things. That’s apples and oranges.”The California Democrat Adam Schiff, the former chair of the House intelligence committee, praised the appointment of a special counsel in the Biden matter and said he wanted Congress to do its own intelligence assessment of the Biden and Trump materials.But Debbie Stabenow, a Democratic senator from Michigan, acknowledged that the discovery of additional documents on Saturday was “certainly embarrassing” and that Republicans would use it as a distraction.“It’s embarrassing that you would find a small number of documents, certainly not on purpose,” she told NBC.Biden’s lawyers, she said “don’t think [this] is the right thing and they have been moving to correct it … it’s one of those moments that obviously they wish hadn’t happened.“But what I’m most concerned about, this is the kind of things that the Republicans love.”TopicsJoe BidenBiden administrationDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsUS national securityRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      What hopes for gun reform now Republicans have House control?

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      What hopes for gun reform now Republicans have House control?State-level victories such as those Illinois and New York likely to become crucial in the battle against gun violence The Illinois capitol was a site of celebration on Tuesday, as state legislators passed a ban on military-style firearms. The legislation made Illinois the ninth US state to enact a ban on such weapons, which have been used in many of the country’s most devastating mass shootings.“Illinois now officially prohibits the sale and distribution of these mass killing machines and rapid-fire devices,” the Democratic governor JB Pritzker said as he signed the bill. He added: “We must keep fighting, voting and protesting to ensure that future generations will only have to read about massacres.”Illinois bans military-style weapons in win for gun control advocatesRead moreIn recent years, the US has seen a flurry of activity at the state level to combat gun violence, which the American Public Health Associations has classified as an epidemic. According to the Gun Violence Archive, guns claimed the lives of more than 44,000 Americans in 2022, including 24,000 who died by suicide. Gun safety groups say passing new laws like the Illinois assault weapons ban will become even more crucial in the coming months to address this issue: with Republicans now in control of the House of Representatives, the prospects for enacting additional federal gun legislation in the near future appear bleak.Republicans regained their majority in the House this month on the heels of one of the most successful years for the gun safety movement in decades. Last June, Joe Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which expanded background checks for the youngest gun buyers and provided funding for mental health and violence intervention programs, among other initiatives. The passage of the BSCA marked the first time in nearly 30 years that the US Congress approved a major gun safety bill.“That’s just the beginning, and we’re just scratching the surface there,” said Zeenat Yahya, director of policy for the gun safety group March For Our Lives. “That’s not the end all, be all, but it was really exciting to see that progress.”Despite gun safety advocates’ demands for more action at the federal level, including a nationwide assault weapons ban, such reform will be difficult to achieve. Even if Senate Democrats manage to pass additional gun regulations, the newly elected House speaker, Republican Kevin McCarthy, will be able to block those bills from receiving a vote in the lower chamber.While acknowledging the challenges posed by a divided Congress, Yahya dismissed suggestions that Republicans’ House majority eliminates the possibility of new federal laws. Biden could still issue executive orders on gun safety, and the passage of the BSCA demonstrated the possibility for bipartisan cooperation on the issue, she argued.“I do believe that there’s still opportunity regardless of the fact that obviously the House is under Republican control now,” Yahya said. “We want to be able to make sure that gun violence prevention is still at the forefront of a conversation, and we’re playing an active role at the federal level.”Still, Yahya agreed that reform at the state level has become “even more important with the Republican control of the House”. In the past year, states have already enacted a number of new gun laws championed by groups like March For Our Lives. According to the group Everytown for Gun Safety, at least 51 new laws aimed at reducing gun violence were passed in 2022, while dozens of bills backed by the gun lobby were defeated.New York’s legislative progress was a particular point of pride for gun safety advocates last year. The state passed a slate of gun proposals in the wake of the massacre at a supermarket in Buffalo, where a white supremacist fatally shot 10 Black shoppers and workers last May. In response, New York legislators raised the age requirement to purchase a long gun from 18 to 21. Lawmakers also established a code of conduct for gun dealers and closed a legal loophole regarding the ownership of high-capacity magazines.But New York’s efforts to reform its laws simultaneously underscored the significant challenges that the gun safety movement faces. Last June, the conservative-leaning supreme court struck down a New York law that placed strict regulations on carrying a firearm in public. In response to the court’s ruling, New York legislators enacted a new law that included an extensive list of sensitive places where guns would be prohibited – such as schools, medical facilities and government buildings. The new policy is now facing legal challenges, although the supreme court ruled Wednesday that the law can remain in effect for the time being.Gun safety advocates highlight New York’s legislative response to the supreme court’s ruling as a key example of how states can proactively address gun violence, even as federal legislation remains stalled.“This year, we’ll be doubling down on our efforts to go statehouse by statehouse to continue to pass life-saving laws,” said Monisha Henley, managing director of state government affairs at Everytown. “That is happening no matter what’s going on in DC.”If history is any indication, the policies now being advanced by state legislatures could one day filter up to the federal level. The BSCA included funding to help states establish “red flag laws,” which allow courts to temporarily confiscate guns from those considered a danger to themselves or others. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have already enacted such policies. “As states are passing critical legislation around safe storage, background checks, red flags … it gives us the opportunity to ladder up at the federal level and say, hey, the majority of states are already doing this,” Yahya said.While advocacy press for more action at the state and federal levels, Americans continue to grapple with the daily reality of gun violence. According to Everytown, more than 110 Americans are killed with guns every day, and more than 200 are shot and wounded.Gun owners also make up a growing share of the US population, although they still represent a minority. Americans have bought roughly 150m firearms since the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. One recent study found that an estimated 6 million Americans carried a loaded handgun on a daily basis in 2019, compared to 3 million who said the same in 2015.In America’s capital city, a local nonprofit has started hanging posters reading “Thou shalt not kill” in a poetic attempt to combat the alarming rise in gun violence that has gripped Washington in recent years.The violence has made Henley and her allies more determined to enact reform across the country, and she predicted that 2023 would bring more change. After the midterm elections, four additional states – Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan and Minnesota – now have Democrats controlling both the state legislature and the governor’s mansion, clearing the way for lawmakers to pas new gun laws.“The states have been leading the way. They will continue leading the way,” Henley said. “[With] these brand new trifectas with gun safety majorities, there will be a lot of positive action that’ll continue to happen on this issue.”TopicsUS gun controlUS politicsRepublicansHouse of RepresentativesfeaturesReuse this content More

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      McCarthy may be speaker, but Trump is the real leader of House Republicans

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      AnalysisMcCarthy may be speaker, but Trump is the real leader of House RepublicansDavid Smith in WashingtonAfter Trump’s pick for speaker narrowly won, what sway will the former president hold over Congress’s Republican majority? Like an exhausted marathon runner, Kevin McCarthy had just about staggered across the finish line. But even at 2.11am, with tempers frayed and eyes bleary, the newly elected speaker of the US House of Representatives wanted to single out one person for praise.“I do want to especially thank President Trump,” McCarthy told reporters after prevailing in the longest election for speaker since before the civil war. “I don’t think anyone should doubt his influence. He was with me from the beginning.”‘It’s going to be dirty’: Republicans gear up for attack on Hunter BidenRead moreThe gushing tribute obscured the complexity of Donald Trump’s intervention in the election for speaker – and what sway he might hold over the narrow Republican majority in the new Congress.The week that followed brought a series of extremist actions and appointments that appear designed to resonate with his rightwing base. But whether House Republicans’ agenda will ultimately complement or conflict with Trump’s 2024 presidential election campaign remains uncertain.McCarthy’s election as speaker took four gruelling days, 15 roll call votes and concessions that he might come to regret. Trump’s endorsement appeared impotent for much of that time, even among some of the former president’s champions in Congress. As he made calls in the dying hours of Friday night, a memorable photo showed Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene attempting to give her phone, with “DT” on the line, to colleague Matt Rosendale, only for him to wave it away.But in the end, Trump’s man won – a sign that he remains important if not decisive. McCarthy duly felt obliged to heap praise on the kingmaker. He also made a somewhat optimistic claim: “This is the great part: because it took this long, now we learned how to govern.”That was immediately put to the test. On Monday evening, Republicans passed legislation to cut funding that was intended to bolster the Internal Revenue Service on a party-line vote. The speaker proclaimed: “Promises made. Promises kept.” Democrats called it a deficit-raising windfall for wealthy tax cheats at the expense of the majority that has no chance of passing in a Senate they still control.On Tuesday, Republicans formed a panel to tackle what they perceive as rampant abuse of power in the federal government, not least by law enforcement agencies investigating Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and handling and storing of presidential records at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.The subcommittee focusing on “the weaponization of the federal government” falls under the judiciary committee, headed by Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio, who has repeatedly said Trump should become president again. It will have access to classified information, a privilege usually reserved for the intelligence committees in the House and Senate.Its “investigate the investigators” mandate was doubtless music to the ears of Trump, who has spent years airing grievances at rallies about a “deep state” conspiracy that led to the Russia investigation and two impeachments. Democrat Jamie Raskin, a prominent member of the now dissolved January 6 committee, called the new panel an “insurrection protection team”.US House of Representatives: who’s who in the new leadership?Read moreOn Wednesday, Republicans targeted abortion. Their majority passed a resolution to condemn attacks on anti-abortion facilities, including crisis pregnancy centers, and a separate bill that would impose new penalties if a doctor refused to care for an infant born alive after an abortion attempt. Neither is expected pass the Democratic-led Senate.The moves were condemned by liberals but did not go as far as some conservatives would have liked – a tacit acknowledgment that abortion has become politically awkward for Republicans since last year’s supreme court decision that overturned Roe v Wade after half a century. Trump has blamed anti-abortion hardliners for Republicans’ disappointing midterm elections results.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “Would you start with that, if you were in their position, having just lost a midterm election effectively because of the abortion issue? What was that doing there in the first place? Forty-eight hours of the actual Congress and this unorganized? Just amazing. There must be a stupidity chemical in the Washington water system.”McCarthy also spent the week fending off questions over calls for fabulist New York congressman George Santos to resign and the deal he struck with the House Freedom Caucus during his epic election battle. Like the Tea Party before it, the House Freedom Caucus is fixated on small government and less spending. Media reports suggest that it intends to seek cuts to entitlement programs such as social security and Medicare as well as to defense and law enforcement.It is all part of an “extreme Maga Republican agenda”, according to Democrats.Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, said in a statement: “In the last week Republicans have given a free pass to wealthy tax cheats, empaneled a committee to undermine and threaten law enforcement, undercut women’s healthcare, and put forward a draconian budget plan that will lead to cuts to Medicare and social security and defunding the police.”There was a further statement of intent in House committees. Despite claiming to have embraced diversity and inclusion, Republicans named fewer women as committee chairs than men named Mike. The new chairs also have records that suggest they are ready to push Trump’s “Make America great again” agenda.Jordan, leading the judiciary panel, has amplified Trump’s “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen and refused to comply with a subpoena issued by the January 6 committee over his communications with the former president.The new chair of the oversight committee, James Comer, has co-sponsored a national abortion ban that could have imprisoned doctors, amplified false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election and called attempts to investigate the January 6 insurrection a “political stunt”, “a big show” and “illegitimate”.2024 Veepstakes: who will Donald Trump choose as his running mate?Read moreJason Smith, chair of the ways and means committee, has supported cutting social security and Medicare, voted to overturn the 2020 election and described the January 6 committee as a “sham” that was “designed to attack President Trump”. Jodey Arrington, chair of the budget committee, has adopted similar positions.Mark Green, chair of the homeland security committee, has introduced legislation to build a border wall and called for the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, to resign. He has also asserted that being “transgender is a disease” and said America must “take a stand on the indoctrination of Islam in our public schools”. Green identifies as a creationist and has argued against the theory of evolution.At first glance, it has the makings of a Trump caucus ready to do its master’s bidding and aid his run for the White House. Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman, said: “Most of what they’re going to focus on is a bunch of revenge stuff for Trump, for how they believe Trump was treated, and a lot of this culture war bullshit.“I’m convinced that a big part of what all these investigations involve is a lot of these guys believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump: the FBI did it, the justice department did it. Trump and the Republicans declared war on the FBI some years ago so they’re going to go after them.”That McCarthy credited Trump with helping him secure the gavel “tells you exactly still where Trump stands in the party”, Walsh added. “McCarthy said that publicly, which is why Trump is still the king of the GOP hill unless something happens.”It was McCarthy who initially condemned Trump over the January 6 assault on democracy only to then make a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago a few weeks later and signal that all was forgiven. Now that Trump has backed McCarthy for speaker, despite significant opposition from his own base, he might expect the California Republican to repay the favour in 2024.But Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, has doubts. “McCarthy is going to go where the winds blow,” he said. “To begin with, as a speaker he has to recognise where everyone in his conference is so he could very easily tell Trump at least during the early part of 2023, ‘Look, I’ve got a five-vote majority. I’ve got people who love you, I’ve got people who hate you, you know I love you but I’ve got to keep this group together.’“He may not like that but, if McCarthy did anything other than that in the initial jousting phases of the primary, McCarthy would be a poor political strategist. And McCarthy may lack certain attributes necessary to be a speaker but reading the room is not something he lacks.”As Trump’s star wanes, rivals signal presidential nomination campaignsRead moreThere are other icebergs on the horizon. Congress faces an agenda of must-pass bills to fund the government, resupply a military depleted by decades of war and support for Ukraine, authorise farming programmes and raise the nation’s borrowing limit to avert a disastrous federal default. In this context, an obsessive Republican pursuit of dead-on-arrival bills and Biden investigations could backfire on Trump.Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, said: “Between opposition within their party, between the Senate and the presidency, they’re not going to win anything. What it’s going to do is be a constant reminder to people of the extremes of the far right and Trump is so firmly associated with them. Substantively they’re alike but stylistically they’re alike as well. It’s bad for him. It paints him into a real corner.”Kamarck, who served in Bill Clinton’s White House, added: “The thing that was amazing about his presidency was that, unlike any other president before him, he did not ever seek to expand his base. He was purely and simply happy with his factional base. The demographics of his factional base are that they’re old so every year that he relies on that base gets more and more problematic.“He’s simply weak. And he’s going to have challengers for the 2024 Republican nomination which will make him look weaker.”TopicsDonald TrumpRepublicansKevin McCarthyHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsanalysisReuse this content More

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      The Fight of His Life review: Joe Biden, White House winner

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      ReviewThe Fight of His Life review: Joe Biden, White House winner Chris Whipple’s assured account of the president’s first two years in power after beating Trump is fascinating and timely“Maybe we don’t suck as much as people thought.”That was the email the White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, sent to Chris Whipple at 1.16am after the 2022 midterms, as it became clear Democrats were likely to hold the Senate and lose far fewer seats in the House than almost every reporter predicted.Whipple’s inside look at Joe Biden’s White House is a ringing confirmation of Klain’s judgment. Though Whipple’s friendships within the Washington press corps prevent him from saying so, this is a book-length rebuke of the incompetence of legions of reporters who have persistently underestimated this extraordinary president.A crucial reason for Democrats’ midterm success was Biden’s instinct to emphasize the importance of reproductive rights and the Republican threat to democracy. Reporters derided him, insisting voters only cared about the price of gas. And yet, as Whipple writes, “exit polls showed that both concern for democracy and a backlash against the supreme court’s Dobbs decision had been winning issues”.How will Biden handle a hostile Republican House and what does it mean for 2024?Read moreThe brilliant and likable Klain began his career clerking for Byron White, John F Kennedy’s only appointee to the supreme court. Klain is the second-most important character in this book, after Biden. He was a great source with many great stories to tell, and Whipple has a special fondness for White House chiefs of staff, the subject of one of his previous volumes.One of many mini-scoops in the book is a description of a Zoom meeting Klain had, a month before Biden’s inauguration, with 18 former chiefs of staff, including George W Bush’s Josh Bolten, who in 2016 tried unsuccessfully to get all former Republican chiefs to declare Donald Trump unfit to be president. Dick Cheney and James Baker refused to do so.At the end of Biden’s first year in office, Klain hailed “the most successful first year of any president ever. We passed more legislation than any president in his first year” – including the American Rescue Plan and the bipartisan infrastructure bill. “We created more jobs than any president in his first year” and – least noted – “we got more federal judges confirmed than any president since Nixon.”Which was all the more astonishing with a 50-50 Senate and a slim House majority. Sixty years ago, to enact Medicare and the rest of the Great Society, Lyndon Johnson needed huge Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.In 2022, long after everyone assumed the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin had killed it, the Build Back Better bill came roaring back to life as the Inflation Reduction Act. To corral Manchin, the administration had to give up on an extension of the child tax credit and throw in a pipeline. But in return there was a $391bn investment in energy and fighting the climate crisis.A big reason Biden struggled in the polls was a decision that required more political courage than anything his three predecessors did: withdrawal from Afghanistan.Biden understood the folly of the war back in 2009, when generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus begged Barack Obama for a troop surge even after Petraeus acknowledged that the Afghan government was a “criminal syndicate”.According to Bob Woodward, then Vice-President Biden went to the heart of the matter: “If the government’s a criminal syndicate a year from now, how will troops make a difference?”Woodward reported that Obama’s special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, was the only other clear-eyed adviser, explaining: “All the contractors for development projects pay the Taliban for protection and use of roads, so American and coalition dollars help finance the Taliban. And with more development, higher traffic on roads and more troops, the Taliban would make more money.”Obama approved a surge of 40,000 troops anyway.Whipple adopts the conventional wisdom about the Afghanistan withdrawal, calling it “a whole-of-government failure” in which “everyone got nearly everything exactly wrong”. He assumes an orderly withdrawal was possible without a reliable Afghan fighting force – an idea for which I have never seen any serious evidence.But unlike other commentators, Whipple at least includes some of the real reasons for the chaos, including a decision driven by Stephen Miller. The leading xenophobe in the Trump White House was determined to destroy the special immigrant visa program, the only way Afghans who worked for the US could come here. In 2020, Trump virtually closed the program, creating a backlog of 17,000 applicants. One of Whipple’s sources described the attitude of the Trump administration this way: it felt America “wasn’t ready to have a lot of hook-nosed, brown-skinned Muslims … coming into this country”.Leon Panetta, a veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations always quick to jump on CNN to attack his former bosses, compared Biden’s handling of the withdrawal to John F Kennedy’s disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.To Whipple, Klain shoots back: “Joe Biden didn’t pay a trillion dollars to these people to be trained to be the army. He wasn’t out there saying for years, as Leon was, that we had built a viable fighting force. Leon favored the war. Leon oversaw the training of the Afghan army … if this was Biden’s Bay of Pigs, it was Leon’s army that lost the fight.”Trump’s political fate may have been decided – by a Georgia grand juryRead moreWhipple makes one other point about Afghanistan. “As an operational success,” the evacuation “ranked with the Berlin airlift.” In 17 days and 387 sorties, the US evacuated 124,000 people.One of the largest sections of Whipple’s book describes Biden’s prescience about Vladimir Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine, and the extraordinary efforts the Biden administration has made to unite Nato and send weapons to Kyiv.Even Panetta was impressed.“This war in Ukraine has really strengthened Joe Biden’s image as a world leader,” he said. “His confrontation with Putin is going to determine what the hell his legacy is going to be as president. I think it’s that big a deal.”
      The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House is published in the US by Scribner
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      The Observer view on the secret garage files that could deal a severe blow to Joe Biden’s hopes | Observer editorial

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      The Observer view on the secret garage files that could deal a severe blow to Joe Biden’s hopesObserver editorialMore harmful than the alleged misplacement of classified documents will be a further erosion of trust in US politics It is almost a Washington tradition that, sooner or later, a sitting president will face investigation by a federal special counsel or special prosecutor – the terms are interchangeable. In recent history, only Barack Obama has escaped this fate and that was not for lack of opponents accusing him of nefarious misdeeds.Now it’s Joe Biden’s turn and wolves are once again baying at the door of the Oval Office.At first glance, last week’s revelations that old, possibly outdated classified documents had been found at a thinktank where Biden worked after leaving the vice-presidency in 2017, and in a garage at his home in Delaware, may not seem such a big deal. But such a view fails to understand the way Washington works. Significant or not, the find has given the flailing Republican party a stick with which to beat the president and it has seized it with grateful alacrity.A clutch of GOP-controlled committees in Congress has already launched a series of investigations, in addition to the independent special counsel inquiry ordered by Biden’s attorney-general, Merrick Garland. They want to know whether national security was compromised; whether Biden’s son Hunter – a longtime Republican target – had access to the files; and why the White House failed to admit their existence until forced to do so by a CBS TV scoop.Crucially, Biden’s opponents are posing the classic Watergate questions: what did the president know, when did he know it and was there a cover-up? It’s a sad fact that whatever Biden says now or in the course of what are likely to be wearying, attritional months of testimony and hearings, many Americans will not believe him. The distrust that infects and distorts US politics can only be expected to deepen.The distraction of attention from Biden’s agenda and achievements is one of many prospective negatives for the president. Another is the unfair, potentially disastrous conflation of his alleged wrongdoing with the ostensibly much more serious case of his predecessor. Donald Trump is accused of secreting hundreds of contemporary classified papers at his Florida home and refusing to hand them over.Biden previously accused Trump of “irresponsible” behaviour, words that are now being thrown back in his face. Suggestions that the misplacing of the documents was a mere oversight or act of forgetfulness play into the hurtful Republican narrative of a senile, incompetent 80-year-old president.Biden did not help himself by joking that his garage was a secure space because he keeps his classic Corvette car there. If the word “Corvette-gate” has not already entered the lexicon, it soon will.The extent of the damage to Biden and the Democrats will depend in part on whether Trump, the Republicans and their Fox News boosters succeed in sustaining and widening the scandal. They will propagate lies, disinformation and conspiracy theories.The White House will try to play down the affair. Yet if, for example, the special counsel discovers the documents – reportedly relating to Ukraine, Iran and the UK – are not merely historical but contain current, sensitive or embarrassing secrets, Biden could be in deep water, politically and legally.It’s almost exactly two years since Biden took office. After a rough start, his fortunes have steadily improved. Inflation is sharply down, Covid is mostly over (unlike in China), Russia is losing in Ukraine, Democrats did better than expected in the midterm elections and Maga Trump-ism continues to divide House Republicans. An announcement of a Biden run for a second term had been expected soon. All these gains suddenly appear in jeopardy and all because of a few dusty boxes of files.TopicsUS politicsOpinionJoe BidenRepublicansDonald TrumpeditorialsReuse this content More

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      There’s one winner in the Biden documents discovery: Donald Trump

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      There’s one winner in the Biden documents discovery: Donald TrumpBiden’s retention of classified papers is different from the Mar-a-Lago case, but it is a big setback for his administration The discovery of government secrets at two locations associated with Joe Biden appears to have produced one big political winner: Donald Trump.The White House was in rare crisis mode last week as it emerged that lawyers for Biden had found classified material at his thinktank in Washington DC and home in Delaware. At an unusually contentious press briefing, one TV correspondent dubbed the affair “garage-gate”.The justice department appointed a special counsel to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents from his time as vice-president. It was a rare setback for an administration that promised to be transparent and scandal-free. It also complicated an investigation into Trump over an ostensibly similar matter.‘It’s going to be dirty’: Republicans gear up for attack on Hunter BidenRead moreAnother special counsel is already examining the ex-president’s retention of top secret papers at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate and club. Although the situations are very different, the nuances and subtleties are likely to be lost in the court of public opinion.“This may be pure sloppiness on Biden’s part or the Biden team’s part but it doesn’t matter,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “In the public mind, now they will say, ‘Well, a pox on both your houses. You’re both guilty. Shame on you both.’ It’s over.”The issue could become a continuing political headache for Biden, Sabato added. “It’s just a real distraction. It was totally unnecessary. Every White House makes mistakes and this is a big one they made.”Despite superficial similarities, the two cases are like chalk and cheese. In January last year the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Trump’s home, telling justice department officials they contained “a lot” of classified material.In August, after prolonged resistance from Trump’s associates to requests and even a justice department subpoena, FBI agents took about 33 boxes and containers of 11,000 documents from Mar-a-Lago, including roughly 100 with classification markings found in a storage room and an office. The FBI warrant showed it was investigating crimes including the wilful retention of national defence information and efforts to obstruct a federal investigation.The Biden papers are far less voluminous. First it emerged that a “small number” with classified markings had been found in November in a locked closet at the Penn Biden Center thinktank in Washington.Speaking to reporters on Tuesday in Mexico City, the president claimed that he was surprised when he was informed about them. His lawyers “did what they should have done” when they immediately alerted the National Archives, he said. “I don’t know what’s in the documents.”Then came news that a second batch of classified documents had been discovered in the garage at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, and one additional classified page was found in his personal library there. Again, his lawyers informed the archives.Biden’s offence is seen by analysts as significantly less grave than his predecessor’s. Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia, said: “Given what we know now, it seems that there is a difference in kind, rather than degree, between Trump’s case and Biden’s case.Classified documents: how do the Trump and Biden cases differ?Read more“For example, quantitatively and qualitatively, Trump’s cavalier and even intentional misconduct regarding the documents, especially those related to national security, appears substantially more egregious than Biden’s apparent neglectful behaviour in not safeguarding certain documents.”Even so, the White House refused to disclose the content and exact number of the Biden records, how they arrived at his thinktank and home , why they stayed there and why the administration waited more than two months to acknowledge their discovery.The questions deepened on Saturday when the White House lawyer Richard Sauber revealed that a total of six pages of classified documents had been found in Biden’s personal library in Wilmington; the administration had previously said only a single page came to light there and insisted that the search was “complete”.White House reporters, who have endured lean times since the wildly norm-busting Trump presidency, have seized on the day-by-day revelations like hungry lions. In the kind of confrontation seldom seen over the past two years, Peter Doocy of the conservative Fox News network asked Biden bluntly: “Classified material next to your Corvette: what were you thinking?”The president replied: “I’m going to get a chance to speak on all this, God willing, soon, but as I said earlier this week, people – and, by the way, my Corvette is in a locked garage. OK? So, it’s not like they’re sitting out in the street.”Merrick Garland, the attorney general, selected Robert Hur, a Trump-appointed former US attorney, to investigate the matter. Many legal commentators suggested that a special counsel would not normally have been warranted but the move reflected Garland’s sensitivity to the unique political dynamics.Trump himself seized on the news, seeking to use it to undermine the investigation into his actions. “It’s over,” he told conservative talk radio host Mark Levin. “When all of these documents started coming out and Biden had them, it really changed the complexion and the intensity that they were showing to me because, you know, what they did is – I don’t say far worse, I did nothing wrong – what they did is not good. What they did is bad.”In reality, the twist is unlikely to affect the justice department’s decision making with regard to charging Trump. But it could make a criminal case a harder sell to voters, fuelling the scepticism of congressional Republicans and others who have doubted the basis for a viable prosecution.Jay Town, who served as US attorney in the northern district of Alabama during the Trump administration, told the Associated Press: “I don’t think that it impacts Trump’s legal calculus at all, but it certainly does impact the political narrative going forward. To the extent that the political narrative is a consideration, it does make it harder to bring charges against former President Trump as it relates to the documents seized at Mar-a-Lago.”Joe Biden may have broken the Espionage Act. It’s so broad that you may have, too | Trevor TimmRead moreThe drama is unfolding just after Republicans took control of the House of Representatives eager to target the federal government with accusations of politically motivated prosecutions. On Friday, Jim Jordan, chair of the House judiciary committee, announced an investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents, particularly what the justice department knew about the matter.Republicans are also well practised in the political art of false equivalence and “whataboutism”. During the 2016 presidential election campaign, allegations that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia were effectively neutralised by a controversy over rival Hillary Clinton’s private email server.The week’s events dealt an unexpected blow to Biden as approval ratings were rising, inflation was slowing and Republicans had just endured a chaotic election for House speaker. They also threw a lifeline to Trump, whose 2024 presidential election campaign made a wretched start. But he still faces myriad investigations into his business affairs and his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.TopicsJoe BidenThe ObserverDonald TrumpRepublicansDemocratsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Serial liar George Santos is the politician Americans deserve | Moira Donegan

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      Serial liar George Santos is the politician Americans deserveMoira DoneganThe congressman’s many lies are the product of a political system that incentivizes dishonesty and punishes sincerity It’s hard to keep track of what, exactly, the newly elected Republican congressman George Santos has said about his own life. His story changes and contradicts itself; his lies seem indiscriminate, and largely ad hoc. He says he worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, which he didn’t. He said he graduated from Baruch College – he didn’t do that, either. Some of his fabrications are so trivial and specific that it’s impossible to ascribe a nefarious motive to them.What could Santos possibly have to gain, for instance, by claiming, as he apparently did to a local Republican party leader, to have been a college volleyball champion? Others are transparently self-serving, his attempts to cover them up so brazen as to be frankly hilarious. On the campaign trail, running in the heavily Jewish third district of New York, on suburban Long Island, Santos claimed that he was “a member of the Jewish community”, and descended from Ukrainian refugees. When this turned out to be untrue, he later tried to claim that he merely meant that he was “Jew-ish”. It was like a line from Seinfeld; punning, implausible, shameless. At times like this, it’s hard to take Santos’s dishonesty seriously. It seems less like an affront to the dignity of the democratic process and more like some kind of durational satire, a piece of performance art.More Republicans call for George Santos to resign over fictional résuméRead moreBut if you take his fictional biography as a whole, it’s clear that Santos was appealing to particular American longings. He was quite savvily inventing a character who would assuage the anxieties and comfort the vanities of the affluent, Republican-leaning voters in his district. On the campaign trail, Santos presented himself as the embodiment of 20th century-style American upward mobility. He claimed to be the son of Brazilian immigrants, who grew up in “abject poverty” and attended public schools before ascending to become a blue-chip financial trader and wealthy philanthropist. It’s a dream that no doubt many still want to believe in. But it should have been a red flag. Anyone who assesses America with clear eyes knows that Goldman Sachs traders don’t come, as Santos says he did, from basement apartments in Jackson Heights, Queens. They come from Dalton, Choate and Exeter.He professed the identities that have been most easily demonized in the Republican imagination: he was supposed to be Jewish, a member of the group targeted by conspiratorial QAnon theories; he was supposed to be gay, a member of the group increasingly smeared on the right as pedophiles; he was supposed to be a Latino immigrant, a member of the group associated with dark fantasies in the white mind about demographic change and crime. But at the same time, he was a Republican, a defender of these bigotries; his membership in the very groups his party worked against seemed to absolve his voters of complicity even as they indulged their bias. The identities were not meant to be investments in the pluralism of our country, but moral shields, flimsy cover behind which attacks on those very groups could be launched.And of course, there were the remarkable historical coincidences, the tendency of Santos to claim his own life intersected with moments of crisis for the American conscience. He said that his grandparents – the supposedly Jewish ones – had been Holocaust survivors. He said that his mom had died in 9/11. He said that he had lost four employees at the Pulse massacre, the event where a gunman opened fire at an Orlando gay club. It seems that he used this proximity to tragedy to some effect in his fundraising; among the several investigations into Santos, there is now one related to campaign expenditures, and the curious way that money seemed to disappear from his account in amounts just beneath the federal reporting threshold where a receipt would be required. Santos, in this telling, had an uncanny, Forrest Gump-like biographical connection to these momentous historical moments, his own life changing at just the same moments that challenged the identity of the nation. It’s not hard to see why this fiction appealed to Santos, and why it appealed to his voters. It made him into an avatar of America itself.Expect the Republican House to be just like the speaker debacle: pure chaosRead moreMaybe he is. Because with his boldness and deception, his shamelessness and alleged comfort with financial malfeasance, Santos, with all his lies, seems to reveal an uncomfortable truth about American politics, emphasizing what the politics writer John Ganz called “the reign of crime”. Politicians, after all, lie all the time, and the Republican party in particular seems to have rapidly mainstreamed the use of fabulism, fraud and cheap scams that manipulate and extort the government, the public and the ruling elite. Are Santos’s lies, after all, any more far-fetched than Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him via a vast, undetected conspiracy? Are his lies about where he worked and went to school any more nefarious than the claim that Covid vaccines kill people, or that drag queens are scheming to molest children at public libraries? Perhaps Santos’s real sin is not in lying, but in telling the wrong lies. He didn’t regurgitate the same fabrications as the rest of his fellow Republicans – the ones about marginalized others. Instead, he merely lied about himself. And crucially, he lied about the one thing that seems to really matter to Republican leadership: he claimed to be a member of the monied elite, when he wasn’t.Santos’s fellow New York Republicans are trying to distance themselves from the congressman, calling on him to resign in the hopes that it will help their own re-election chances. “He needs help,” said Jennifer DeSena, a local Republican official from Long Island. “This is not a normal person.” And indeed it’s hard not to suspect that there might be something wrong with the man, aside from the moral turpitude – a delusional tendency or break with reality that precipitated all these fictions. But it would be a mistake to think that George Santos’s pathologies are his alone. His lies are the product of a political system that incentivizes dishonesty, punishes sincerity and is rife with opportunities for petty crooks. In that sense, Santos is the politician that we deserve.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
      TopicsGeorge SantosOpinionRepublicansUS politicscommentReuse this content More