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      Montana supreme court blocks ban on gender-affirming care for trans minors

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      Montana’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors has been temporarily blocked by the state supreme court on grounds that it is likely to violate the right to privacy enshrined in the state’s constitution.The top court in Montana sided on Wednesday with an earlier district court decision blocking SB 99, the ban introduced last year by the Republican-controlled state legislature. The decision will allow under-18 transgender girls and boys to continue gender-affirming medical treatment pending a full trial.Montana’s supreme court justices agreed with the district court judge Jason Marks who put a stop to the ban in September 2023, just days before it came into effect. Marks ruled: “The legislature has no interest … to justify its interference with an individual’s fundamental privacy right to obtain a particular lawful medical procedure from a healthcare provider.”The decision to allow gender-affirming treatment to continue for the time being was greeted with delight by the young plaintiffs and advocacy groups. Zooey Zephyr, a Democrat who is the first out trans member of the state legislature, said on social media: “Montana has a constitutional right to privacy, including in our healthcare decisions. Today our constitution continues to protect individuals from government overreach.”Zephyr was propelled into the national limelight in the spring of 2023 when she spoke passionately against the ban in the Montana house. She was banished from the chamber by the Republican leadership prompting large protests.Montana is among at least 26 states that have introduced bans on gender-affirming medical care for minors. By contrast, 15 states have enacted protections for under-18s seeking treatment.The state’s supreme court ruling comes at a critical moment in the nationwide battle over medical care for trans youth. Earlier this month the US supreme court heard oral arguments in a landmark case brought by the ACLU and others against Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming hormonal therapies for trans minors.The ultra-conservative supermajority of the US supreme court appeared to be minded to uphold the Tennessee ban. However, trans adolescents in Montana would be shielded against any adverse ruling from the country’s highest court because the Montana decision is based entirely on the state’s own constitution and as such is insulated from the federal courts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I will never understand why my representatives are working to strip me of my rights and the rights of other transgender kids,” one of the plaintiffs, Phoebe Cross, a 17-year-old transgender boy, said in a statement after the state supreme court issued its decision. “Just living as a trans teenager is difficult enough, the last thing me and my peers need is to have our rights taken away.”Cross’s parents, Molly and Paul Cross, were also plaintiffs, alongside Jane and John Doe on behalf of their 16-year-old trans daughter. Two medical providers of gender-affirming care in Montana also joined the suit in protest against SB 99 that punishes doctors or healthcare professionals who knowingly violate the ban with suspension from medical practice for at least a year.Akilah Deernose, director of the ACLU of Montana which represented the plaintiffs, said the ruling “permits our clients to breathe a sigh of relief”. But she warned: “The fight for trans rights is far from over.” More

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      Wisconsin files more charges against Trump allies who led ‘fake electors’ plot

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      Wisconsin’s justice department filed 10 additional charges on Tuesday against three Donald Trump allies who spearheaded the “fake electors” scheme to help the president-elect in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The three men, Kenneth Chesebro, Michael Roman and James Troupis, already faced felony forgery charges in June for their role in the plot. The additional charges include conspiracy to commit a crime and numerous counts of fraud.In Wisconsin, the individual false electors have faced civil penalties and agreed to never serve as electors while Trump is on the ballot and to issue a public statement acknowledging that their votes had been cast in an attempt to disrupt Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.Republicans submitted false slates of electors in seven swing states, but only some have faced civil and criminal penalties.Unlike in Michigan, Georgia and Arizona, where electors were charged with crimes for participating in the false elector scheme, Wisconsin’s false electors have not faced criminal charges. Instead, the state has hit the architects of the scheme with the most serious penalties.According to the complaint and documents released previously in civil court, Chesebro led the effort, circulating a memo titled “The Real Deadline for Settling a State’s Electoral Votes”, which made the case for Trump’s electors to submit false electoral certificates – despite the fact that Trump did not win the election.The complaint lays out how Chesebro and Troupis, both attorneys, coordinated with Roman, a Trump aide, to establish the plot in states across the country. It notes that while in some states, the false electors submitted qualifying language in their certificates to indicate that they had submitted their names in case Trump was ultimately declared the winner of the election, Wisconsin’s electors included no such language.Troupis, Roman and Chesebro have faced prosecution for their involvement in the 2020 false elector schemes in other states including Arizona and Georgia, where Chesebro pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit filing false documents. Troupis continued to serve on a Wisconsin judicial ethics panel following the false elector episode and was only suspended from his role in June, when he was first charged with felony forgery in connection with the plot. More

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      Trump’s deportation plan would hurt families and economy, Senate hears

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      Donald Trump’s vow to carry out the largest deportation campaign in American history would separate families and hurt the economy, witnesses testified during a Tuesday Senate hearing, as a top Republican on the committee warned that undocumented people living in the country should “get ready to leave”.The president-elect has outlined an aggressive second-term immigration agenda that includes plans to declare a national emergency and deploy the US military to round up and expel millions of people living in the country without documentation. Trump has also vowed to end humanitarian protections for millions of people who fled violence, conflict or other disasters in their home country.The hearing, convened by Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee, set out to explore the economic and human toll of a large-scale deportation operation. But the session also revealed the ideological tensions that have for decades thwarted legislative attempts at immigration reform.“If you’re here illegally, get ready to leave. If you’re a criminal, we’re coming after you,” said Lindsey Graham, the top Republican on the Senate judiciary committee. When Republicans assume the Senate majority next year, Graham promised his party would bring forward a “transformational border security bill” that would expand capacity at detention centers, boost the number of immigration officers and “finish the wall”.Many of Trump’s most controversial immigration policies, including family separation, proved deeply unpopular during his first term in office. But a post-pandemic rise in global migration led to a surge of asylum claims at the US-Mexico border during the early years of the Biden administration. Americans strongly disapproved of Biden’s handling of the issue, and ranked immigration as a top election issue.The November election was a “referendum on the federal border policies for the Biden-Harris administration”, the senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican and the ranking member on the judiciary committee’s immigration subcommittee, declared during the hearing.The Democratic senators insisted that there were areas of common ground between the parties – repeatedly stating their support for the removal of immigrants with criminal records and the need for better controls at the border. And they emphasized the broad support for protecting Dreamers, people brought to the country as children.“Instead of mass deportations, [let’s have] mass accountability,” said the senator Dick Durbin, the committee’s Democratic chair. “Let’s fix our broken immigration system in a way that protects our country and honors our heritage as a nation of immigrants.”Democrats turned to their witnesses – an immigration expert, a retired army major general and an undocumented prosecutor – to make the case that mass deportations would do far more harm than good.“The president-elect’s mass deportation plans would crash the American economy, break up families and take a hammer to the foundations of our society by deporting nearly 4% of the entire US population,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan American Immigration Council, testified to the committee.An analysis by his group estimates that it would cost nearly $1tn to carry out Trump’s mass deportation plan and slash the annual GDP by between 4.2% and 6.8% – a level on par with the recession of 2008. Asked how Trump’s plans could impact Americans financially, Reichlin-Melnick said it would exacerbate inflation and cause food prices to rise.“A single worksite raid in 2018 under the Trump administration at a beef plant in Tennessee led to ground beef prices rising by 25 cents for the year that the plant was out of operation following the raid,” he said.Randy Manner, a retired US army major general and anti-Trump Republican, cautioned against using US troops to assist with a politically decisive domestic mission that he warned could undermine military readiness and erode public trust in the institution.“The US military is the best trained in the world for its war fighting mission, but it is neither trained or equipped for immigration enforcement,” he said.Among the witnesses invited to testify was Foday Turay, an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia who fled Sierra Leone as a child and testified that he did not know he was undocumented until he went to apply for a driver’s license. He is shielded from deportation by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.As a father, a husband, an immigrant and a prosecutor, Turay said the threat of mass deportations would affect him “on a personal level, on a community level and on a societal level.“If I were to be deported, my wife and our son would be left without money to pay the mortgage. My son would also be without a father,” he said. He also warned that the widespread deployment of immigration agents could chill the ability of law enforcement to pursue criminals.“As a prosecutor, I know how delicate the ties between law enforcement and immigrants can be if immigrants are afraid to cooperate with the police or prosecutors like myself because they’re afraid of deportation,” he added. “Mass deportation hurts all of us, our families, our community and our society.”Republicans invited Patty Morin, the mother of 37-year-old Rachel Morin, who was beaten, raped and killed in August 2023 during a hiking trip. Officials say the suspect in her death was in the US illegally after killing a woman in his native El Salvador. Trump, with the support of the Morin family, has cited the murder as part of his appeal for stricter border controls.“The American people should not feel afraid to live in their own homes,” Patty Morin told the committee. “We need to follow the laws that are already on the books, we need to close our borders. We need to protect American families.”Seeking common ground, the Democratic senator Peter Welch of Vermont asked Morin if she would support a deportation policy that targeted undocumented people with a criminal record while pursuing a legal remedy for those who have lived and worked in the US with no criminal record.“Are we saying it’s ok to come to America in an unlawful way?” Morin replied. “There has to be some kind of a line, a precedent, of what is lawful and what isn’t lawful.”The senator Alex Padilla, a California Democrat who has been sharply critical of Trump’s immigration proposals, accused his Republican colleagues of distorting data and conflating fentanyl deaths with immigration. Citing federal statistics, he said the vast majority – more than 80% – of people prosecuted for trafficking the drug into the country were US citizens.“If that’s a concern, then let’s address the heart of the concern and not just use it as a sound bite to further attack immigrants,” he said.Ahead of the hearing, Padilla was among a group of Democratic senators who sent a letter to the president urging Biden to extend humanitarian protections to certain groups and to expedite the processing of applicants for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which shields from deportation undocumented people brought into the US as children.“We urge you to act decisively between now and the inauguration of the president-elect to complete the important work of the past four years and protect immigrant families,” the letter said.Earlier this week, the White House released a memo outlining Biden’s priorities for his final days in office that did not include any reference to immigration-related actions. More

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      Trump promises ‘fully expedited approvals and permits’ to billionaire investors in the US – live

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      As he closed his speech at the Brookings Institution, Joe Biden singled out Project 2025 as being particularly harmful, and said he hoped Donald Trump does not follow the rightwing blueprint’s proposals to remake the US government.“I pray to God the president-elect throws away Project 2025. I think it’d be an economic disaster for us and the region,” Biden said.Trump has publicly repudiated Project 2025, but since winning re-election has appointed conservatives involved in drawing up the document to positions in his incoming administration. Here’s more on what they might do:We’re pausing this blog for now. Thanks for following along.

      In a speech billed at promoting his economic accomplishments, Joe Biden warned Donald Trump against imposing tariffs and cutting taxes – two of the key planks of his successful re-election campaign. The president also defended America’s dominant role in global affairs, and said implementing Project 2025 would result in “economic disaster”.

      Earlier in the day, Senate Democrats convened a hearing meant to explore the implications of Trump’s vow to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Senate judiciary committee chair Dick Durbin said such deportations “would damage our economy and separate American families”. Lindsey Graham, the top-ranking Republican on the committee, promised senators would get to work on a “transformational border security bill” as soon as Trump takes office.
      Here’s what else happened today:

      Adam Schiff, a Democratic former member of the January 6 committee, said he did not think it was necessary for Biden to issue pre-emptive pardons to the panel’s members, despite Trump’s threats to jail them.

      Mitch McConnell, the 82-year-old outgoing Senate Republican leader, suffered a fall, but has been cleared to get back to work.

      The New York attorney general, Letitia James, reportedly told Trump’s attorneys she will keep pursuing the $454m-plus judgment levied against him for business fraud.

      Matt Gaetz is joining rightwing broadcaster One America News Network as an anchor.

      Trump was up late last night, writing weird stuff about Canada.
      Adam Schiff, a Democratic former member of the January 6 committee, said he did not think it was necessary for Joe Biden to issue pre-emptive pardons to those involved in the bipartisan House investigation of the attack on the Capitol.In an interview over the weekend, Donald Trump alleged that the committee had destroyed its evidence, and the committee members “should go to jail”. The committee’s report and its supporting documents remain publicly available online.Speaking at the Capitol, Schiff, who was just sworn in as a senator representing California, said:
      I don’t think the incoming president should be threatening his political opponents with jail time. That’s not the kind of talk we should hear from the president in a democracy. Nor do I think that a pardon is necessary for the members of the January 6th Committee.
      We’re proud of the work we did in that committee. It was fundamental oversight obligation to investigate the first attempt to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power in our history.
      Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell was injured in a fall today, but has been cleared to get back to work, his office said.“Leader McConnell tripped following lunch. He sustained a minor cut to the face and sprained his wrist. He has been cleared to resume his schedule,” a spokesperson for the long-serving Senate Republican leader said.McConnell, 82, is in his final weeks leading the party in the Senate. John Thune will be the GOP leader next year, when the party takes the majority in the chamber.Last year, reports emerged that McConnell had suffered multiple falls, and he also repeatedly appeared to freeze up in public. He is expected to continue serving as a senator representing Kentucky through 2026, when his current term expires.Further deepening his unusually close ties with billionaires, Donald Trump has promised “fully expedited approvals and permits” to people who invest $1bn or more in the United States.Writing on Truth Social, Trump said:
      Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!
      Trump has nominated several billionaires to his cabinet, and put the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of the quasi-governmental “Department of Government Efficiency”. Here’s more about that:Dozens of Nobel laureates have banded together to urge the Senate to reject Robert F Kennedy Jr, the conspiracy theorist who Donald Trump nominated to lead the department of health and human services. Here’s more, from the Guardian’s Robert Tait:Seventy-seven Nobel laureates have signed a letter urging the US Senate to reject Robert F Kennedy Jr as Donald Trump’s nominee for health and human services secretary, arguing that he is unfit and would put American public health “in jeopardy”.It is believed to be the first time in living memory that Nobel prize winners have united against a presidential cabinet pick, and comes against a backdrop of Kennedy’s public support for discredited theories, including a claim that childhood vaccines cause autism.In their letter, prize winners in the fields of medicine, chemistry, physics and economics castigate Kennedy for a “lack of credentials” and point out that he has been “a belligerent critic” of some of the agencies that he would oversee, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).“The proposal to place Mr Kennedy in charge of the federal agencies responsible for protecting the public health of American citizens and for conducting the medical research that benefits our country and the rest of humanity has been widely criticised on multiple grounds,” the laureates say in the letter, first obtained by the New York Times.Donald Trump’s picks for FBI director and attorney general have former federal prosecutors worried, the Guardian’s Peter Stone reports:By tapping two combative ultra-loyalists to run the FBI and the justice department, Donald Trump has sparked fears they will pursue the president-elect’s calls for “revenge” against his political foes and sack officials who Trump demonizes as “deep state” opponents, say ex-justice department prosecutors.Kash Patel and Pam Bondi, who Trump has nominated to run the FBI and Department of Justice, respectively, have been unswerving loyalists to Trump for years, promoting Trump’s false claims that his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden was due to fraud.Patel was a top lawyer on the House intelligence panel under rightwing member Devin Nunes for part of Trump’s first term and then held a few posts in the Trump administration including at the national security council advising the president.Bondi, a recent corporate lobbyist and an ex-Florida attorney general, defended Trump during his first impeachment and was active on the campaign trail during the late stages of his 2024 run.Patel and Bondi have each echoed Trump’s calls for taking revenge against key Democrats and officials, including ones who pursued criminal charges against Trump for his aggressive efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat and his role in inflaming the January 6 attack on the Capitol that led to five deaths.Trump has lavished praise on both picks, calling Patel a “brilliant lawyer” and “advocate for truth”, while hailing Bondi as “loyal” and “qualified”. But critics say their rhetoric and threats are “incredibly harmful to public trust” in the two agencies undermining the integrity of the FBI and justice department, and potentially spurring violence.Alternatively, Merchan could choose to uphold the verdict and proceed to sentencing or delay the case until Trump leaves office.Trump will be the first president, former or current, to be a convicted criminal.In more Trump legal news, the president-elect might lose his months-long fight to reverse his conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records, the Associated Press reports.Prosecutors are trying to convince Judge Juan M Merchan, acting justice of the New York state supreme court in New York county, to preserve Donald Trump’s hush money criminal conviction before he becomes president. This way, the case would be permanently suspended, allowing Trump’s conviction to stand and bar any attempts to appeal.Trump’s legal team has urged Merchan to dismiss the case and argue letting it go on would cause unconstitutional “disruptions” to his presidency.Some background: Trump has been convicted of manipulating documents to conceal a $130,000 payment to pornographic film actor Stormy Daniels in order to quiet her claim that they had sexual relations more than a decade ago. Trump denies any wrongdoing.Here’s more, from the AP:
      Prosecutors are urging a judge not to throw out President-elect Donald Trump’s hush money criminal conviction but suggesting a willingness to end the case in a way that would preserve the verdict while avoiding punishment or a protracted legal fight.
      In court papers made public on Tuesday, the Manhattan district attorney’s office proposed an array of options for keeping the historic conviction on the books, including asking Judge Juan M. Merchan to consider treating the case the way he would when a defendant dies.
      That would effectively put the case into a permanent state of suspended animation. Trump’s conviction would stand, but everything would freeze, including any appeal action. It is unclear if that option is viable under New York law.
      “As applied here, this Court could similarly terminate the criminal proceeding by placing a notation in the record that the jury verdict removed the presumption of innocence; that defendant was never sentenced; and that his conviction was neither affirmed nor reversed on appeal because of presidential immunity,” prosecutors wrote in an 82-page filing.
      Among the other options prosecutors proposed was delaying sentencing until after Trump leaves office in 2029. However, they were adamant that the conviction should stand, arguing that Trump’s impending return to the White House should not upend a jury’s finding.
      In a speech billed at promoting his economic accomplishments, Joe Biden warned Donald Trump against imposing tariffs and cutting taxes – two of the key planks of his successful re-election campaign. The president also defended America’s dominant role in global affairs, and said implementing Project 2025 would result in “economic disaster”. Earlier in the day, Senate Democrats convened a hearing meant to explore the implications of Trump’s vow to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Senate judiciary committee chair Dick Durbin said such deportations “would damage our economy and separate American families”. Lindsey Graham, the top-ranking Republican on the committee, promised senators would get to work on a “transformational border security bill” as soon as Trump takes office.Here’s what else is going on:

      New York attorney general Letitia James reportedly told Trump’s attorneys she will keep pursuing the $454m-plus judgment levied against him for business fraud.

      Matt Gaetz is joining rightwing broadcaster One America News Network as an anchor.

      Trump was up late last night, writing weird stuff about Canada.
      As he closed his speech at the Brookings Institution, Joe Biden singled out Project 2025 as being particularly harmful, and said he hoped Donald Trump does not follow the rightwing blueprint’s proposals to remake the US government.“I pray to God the president-elect throws away Project 2025. I think it’d be an economic disaster for us and the region,” Biden said.Trump has publicly repudiated Project 2025, but since winning re-election has appointed conservatives involved in drawing up the document to positions in his incoming administration. Here’s more on what they might do:With Donald Trump mulling pulling the country back from its international alliances and commitments, Joe Biden argued that it was essential that the United States remains dominant in global affairs.“If we do not lead the world, what nation leads the world?” Biden, his voice raised, said in a speech to the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington DC thinktank. “Who pulls Europe together, who tries to pull the Middle East together? How do in the Indian Ocean? What do we do in Africa? We, the United States, lead the world.”Referring to economic policies pursued by his administration and others that Trump has vowed to reverse, Biden said: “My hope and belief is that the decisions and investments that are now so deeply rooted through the nation, it’s going to be politically costly and economically unsound for the next president to disrupt.”Joe Biden singled out Donald Trump’s proposals to impose steep tariffs on US allies and rivals alike and to extend tax cuts enacted during his first administration as policies that would undermine the economy’s health.“By all accounts, the incoming administration is determined to return the country … [to] trickle-down economics, and another tax cut for the very wealthy that will not be paid for, or if paid for, is going to have a real cost, once again, causing massive deficits or significant cuts in basic programs of healthcare, education, veterans benefits,” Biden said.“On top of that, he seems determined to impose steep, universal tariffs on all imported goods brought to this country on the mistaken belief that foreign countries will bear the cost of those tariffs, rather than the American consumer. Who do you think pays for this? I believe this approach is a major mistake. I believe we’ve proven that approach is a mistake over the past four years, but … we will know in time what will happen.”Joe Biden has generally refrained from criticizing Donald Trump since his presidential election victory, but subtly needled his Republican successor in a speech where the president defended his economic record.“Next month, my administration will end, and a new administration will begin. Most economists agree the new administration is going to inherit a fairly strong economy, at least at the moment, an economy going through fundamental transformation that’s laid out a stronger foundation and a sustainable, broad-based, highly productive growth,” Biden said. “It is my profound hope that the new administration will preserve and build on this progress.”Later on, Trump singled out Trump for criticism over his handling of the pandemic. “The previous administration, quite frankly, had no plan, real plan, to get us through one of the toughest periods in our nation’s history,” Biden said.And though Trump campaigned on tearing up Biden’s legislative accomplishments – and has the votes to do it, thanks to Republican victories that will give them control of Congress – the president predicted that undoing his 2022 effort to overhaul the nation’s infrastructure will be impossible, since it benefits so many red states.“We had infrastructure week for four years, nothing got built,” Biden said, in yet another dig at Trump.“Everybody said when I wanted to have an infrastructure bill that mattered, over $1.3tn, we’d never get it done. We got it done. The next president has a gameplan I laid out, and by the way, he’s going to find, since I made a promise I’d invest as much in red states as blue, he’s gonna have trouble not doing it. He’s gonna have a lot of red state senators that are opposed to all of it and voted for it deciding it’s very much in their interest to build the facilities that are on the block.”A Senate hearing on mass deportations ended on a bitter note, with a series of back-and-forths between Republicans on the committee and a majority witness invited to testify about the cost and economic impact of removing millions of immigrants from the labor force.Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, repeatedly testified that he did not support “open borders” despite Republican senators claiming he did.Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana spent his allotted time questioning Reichlin-Melnick about old tweets while Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, called him a part of the problem. A pre-election report published by the American Immigration Council, which supports comprehensive immigration reform, found that mass deportations on the scale Donald Trump has proposed would cost at least $315bn and would hurt the economy, especially in key industries like agriculture and constructionThe exchanges underscored just how polarized Congress is over the issue and how little appetite there is for compromise in an area that was at the heart of Trump’s re-election pitch. In a sign that Democrats are scrambling for a response, several senators stressed their agreement with Republicans and Trump that immigrants with a criminal record should be deported, while also talking about the importance of protecting Dreamers.Matt Gaetz, who resigned his seat in Congress after Donald Trump nominated him as his attorney general, only to withdraw his nomination after reports emerged of sexual misconduct, has joined the One America News Network (OAN), a rightwing outlet.Starting in January, Gaetz will host a one-hour prime-time show aptly titled “The Matt Gaetz Show”, and also co-host a video podcast, the network announced.“OAN is blazing a trail in media, embracing not just traditional news but the platforms where Americans are going – streaming, apps, podcasts, and social media. I couldn’t be more thrilled to join OAN’s forward-thinking team and be part of this revolutionary expansion,” Gaetz said in a statement.New York attorney general Letitia James has told Donald Trump’s attorneys that she will continue pursuing a $454m civil fraud judgment her office won against the president-elect, despite his looming inauguration, the Hill reports.Trump’s lawyers had asked her to support vacating the judgment, citing his presidential election victory. In a letter in response, James said: “Mr. Trump’s upcoming inauguration as the next president of the United States has no bearing on the pendency of defendants’ appeal in this action. “An appeals court heard arguments in September in Trump’s challenge to the civil fraud judgment, which centered on claims that he inflated his wealth to secure better lending conditions. Here’s more: More

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      Key US unit fighting disinformation abroad in jeopardy ahead of Trump return

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      The Global Engagement Center (GEC), a state department unit critical to combating foreign disinformation, will not receive a multi-year extension in the latest National Defense Authorization Act, putting its future operations in jeopardy.The next chapter of the GEC – which only addresses foreign influence operations outside the United States – now relies on Congress to come up with an extension some other way by 24 December, or the United States faces a potential gap in their international disinformation response capabilities.In response to the NDAA snub over the weekend, a state department spokesperson told the Guardian: “As our adversaries continue to ramp up their efforts globally, it’s counterintuitive – and dangerous – to weaken or worse yet dismantle, the US’s leadership in this critical mission.”The GEC is looking to be the latest institutional target to get hit by congressional Republicans, who have grown increasingly skeptical of the center and other US agencies for allegedly censoring conservative viewpoints. Last year, the Republican-led House judiciary committee labelled the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as “the nerve center” of the government’s social media censorship apparatus.The GEC has been instrumental in exposing significant disinformation campaigns in Latin America and Moldova, including a complex Russian operation in Africa called the “African Initiative” this year. This campaign sought to undermine US and western influence by spreading conspiracy theories about US-funded health programs through social media, websites and Telegram channels.Bipartisan supporters, including Chris Murphy, a Connecticut senator, and John Cornyn, a Texas senator, had proposed an amendment to extend the center’s mandate through 2031, but the effort ultimately failed to make it into the final NDAA text.Marco Rubio, a Florida senator, Trump’s pick for secretary of state, has long been vocal about his concerns about foreign influence operations by way of China and Russia. His office did not respond to a request for comment on whether it would back the state’s GEC entering a new era.Several prominent Republican lawmakers, including the outgoing House foreign affairs chair Michael McCaul, have criticized the GEC for allegedly overstepping its mandate. Those lawmakers argue that the center, through its connection with the UK-based Global Disinformation Index, has been complicit in labeling conservative media outlets as high-risk for spreading disinformation.“A win for free speech and Main Street America!” the House Committee on Small Business posted on X on Tuesday. “The shuttering of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center means there is one less way for unelected bureaucrats to violate Americans’ First Amendment rights.”According to the center’s own assessment, countries like China have invested “billions of dollars” to exert global information control through disinformation and propaganda. More

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      Trump picks Maga darling Harmeet Dhillon to lead civil rights cases at DoJ

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      Donald Trump picked Harmeet Dhillon, a Maga darling and ardent supporter, to lead civil rights cases at the US Department of Justice, a sign of major changes ahead in the agency’s priorities.Dhillon made her name in Maga circles by taking on culture-war cases as a San Francisco lawyer and became a fixture in rightwing media, appearing often on Fox shows. She has filed various lawsuits over election “integrity” issues and supported Trump’s quests to overturn results in 2020.In announcing Dhillon’s nomination, Trump cited a laundry list of cases she’s working on, including “taking on Big Tech for censoring our Free Speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID, and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers”.He also mentioned how Dhillon’s lawsuits on election law fought to “ensure that all, and ONLY, legal votes are counted”.“In her new role at the DOJ, Harmeet will be a tireless defender of our Constitutional Rights, and will enforce our Civil Rights and Election Laws FAIRLY and FIRMLY,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.“I’m extremely honored by President Trump’s nomination to assist with our nation’s civil rights agenda,” Dhillon wrote on Twitter/X after the nomination. “It has been my dream to be able to serve our great country, and I am so excited to be part of an incredible team of lawyers led by @PamBondi. I cannot wait to get to work!”Trump previously announced Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida and a Trump defense attorney, as his pick to lead the justice department.As a lawyer in California, Dhillon has sued the University of California, Berkeley for its speech policies, represented rightwing undercover operation Project Veritas and the former Fox host Tucker Carlson, and filed lawsuits over pandemic restrictions. She served as a legal adviser to Trump in 2020 and ran to replace Ronna McDaniel as chair of the Republican National Committee in 2023, seeking to make the party organization more Trump-friendly. During the 2024 election, she was dispatched to Arizona by the Trump campaign, a decision that some saw as a sign the campaign was ready to make aggressive legal moves if needed to win there.She founded a legal non-profit, the Center for American Liberty, which uses the courts to go after violations of civil liberties and defend against the “coordinated assault on our civil liberties from corporations, politicians, socialist revolutionaries, and inept or biased government officials”, the organization’s website says.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA Guardian investigation in 2023 found that the non-profit paid Dhillon’s law firm, Dhillon Law Group, at least $1.32m, which experts said was “problematic”. The reporting also noted that Dhillon was paid a $120,000 salary from the non-profit for working two hours a week.Democracy Docket said Dhillon has emerged as “one of the leading legal figures working to roll back voting rights across the country”. It tracked Dhillon or other attorneys at her firms as being involved in more than a dozen lawsuits across the states that challenged voting rights, election processes or Trump’s eligibility for office. She defended Trump in the Colorado case challenging his ability to run for office because of the January 6 insurrection.“Democrats are conspiring to commit the biggest election interference fraud in world history, right before our eyes, as government officials avert their eyes to the mockery of the constitution and our laws,” she said in late 2023 of efforts to keep Trump off the ballot. “This is a low point in American history.”Dhillon also faced hateful backlash from the far-right over her religion after appearing at the Republican convention in 2024. Dhillon, who is Sikh, gave a Sikh prayer at the convention, which some far-right figures called blasphemous. Before her rise in Trumpworld, she gained public attention for writing legal memos defending Sikhs who wore turbans from racial profiling after the 9/11 attacks. More

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      The Guardian view on Trump’s threat to the media: time to pass the Press Act

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      Fears of a press crackdown under Donald Trump’s second term deepened with his nomination of Kash Patel as FBI director – given his calls for retribution against journalists. Yet a rare chance to protect press freedom has emerged. The bipartisan Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (Press) Act, the strongest press freedom legislation in US history, is on the brink of a vote. While President-elect Trump has urged Republicans to block it, the Senate could still deliver it to Joe Biden before the lame-duck session ends in January.The Press Act would ban secret government demands for journalists’ communications from tech giants such as Google or Verizon and protect reporters from jail for refusing to reveal sources. For investigative reporters to do their jobs – holding government officials to account for corruption and wrongdoing – they need to be able to protect the confidentiality of their sources. With courts recently weakening already-imperilled “reporter’s privilege” protections, this bill would finally give journalists in the US federal protections comparable to those afforded to other relationships where confidentiality is paramount, such as lawyers and clients, doctors and patients, and spouses.The bill has something for both Democrats and Republicans to like. The Press Act’s broad and nonpartisan definition of “journalist” takes into account the modern media landscape: you don’t have to work full-time for a mainstream media organisation to be covered. Freelancers, independent reporters writing Substack newsletters and even journalists posting primarily to social networks such as X would be included. It protects right-leaning journalists just as much as anyone at the New York Times or the Guardian.It also has commonsense national security exceptions (like preventing a terrorist attack or an imminent threat of violence) without diluting the bill’s strong protections. It’s worth remembering that Democratic administrations have abused their powers to go after the first amendment rights of journalists just as much as Republicans. The Obama administration brought a record number of prosecutions against whistleblowers, and was implicated in several government spying scandals, including secretly targeting journalists at the Associated Press and Fox News.Even the Biden administration, before reversing course after public outrage, continued pursuing at least some of the surveillance orders against news outlets that the first Trump administration initiated. That’s why, in an age of extreme political polarisation, the Press Act is about as bipartisan as it gets. The House passed the bill early in 2024 unanimously, with several prominent Republicans publicly touting its importance. The bill also has powerful co-sponsors in the Senate, ranging from Democrats such as Ron Wyden and Dick Durbin, the judiciary committee chair, to Trump-supporting Republicans like Mike Lee and Lindsey Graham.Even the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson supports the bill, as he made clear in a recent interview he did with the former Fox News and CBS reporter Catherine Herridge, who was subpoenaed to reveal a source for a story she wrote several years ago. She was recently in front of the DC court of appeals, where her lawyers argued that forcing reporters to reveal their sources in court sends a chilling effect to countless others around the country. For the bill to pass, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, must make it a priority. The lame-duck session is only a few weeks long; if senators don’t act now, we may not have this opportunity for another decade or more.

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      in US Politics

      ‘Incredibly harmful’: why Trump’s FBI and DoJ picks scare civil liberties experts

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      By tapping two combative ultra-loyalists to run the FBI and the justice department, Donald Trump has sparked fears they will pursue the president-elect’s calls for “revenge” against his political foes and sack officials who Trump demonizes as “deep state” opponents, say ex-justice department prosecutors.Kash Patel and Pam Bondi, who Trump has nominated to run the FBI and Department of Justice, respectively, have been unswerving loyalists to Trump for years, promoting Trump’s false claims that his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden was due to fraud.Patel was a top lawyer on the House intelligence panel under rightwing member Devin Nunes for part of Trump’s first term and then held a few posts in the Trump administration including at the national security council advising the president.Bondi, a recent corporate lobbyist and an ex-Florida attorney general, defended Trump during his first impeachment and was active on the campaign trail during the late stages of his 2024 run.Patel and Bondi have each echoed Trump’s calls for taking revenge against key Democrats and officials, including ones who pursued criminal charges against Trump for his aggressive efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat and his role in inflaming the January 6 attack on the Capitol that led to five deaths.Trump has lavished praise on both picks, calling Patel a “brilliant lawyer” and “advocate for truth”, while hailing Bondi as “loyal” and “qualified”. But critics say their rhetoric and threats are “incredibly harmful to public trust” in the two agencies undermining the integrity of the FBI and justice department, and potentially spurring violence.Patel promised last year on Steve Bannon’s show to “go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media … who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections”.Patel, 44, who last year published a “deep state” enemies list as part of a book, added:“We’re going to come after you … Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”At the end of his first term as Trump scrambled aggressively to block Biden’s win, he briefly tried to install Patel as number two at the FBI or the CIA for support, but the idea died when the then attorney general, Bill Barr, vowed “over my dead body”.Meanwhile, Bondi, 59, told Fox News last year that when Trump wins “you know what’s going to happen: the Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated. Because the deep state … they were hiding in the shadows.”Bondi added: “But now, they have a spotlight on them, and they can all be investigated, and the House needs to be cleaned out. Because now we know who most of them are; there’s a record of it, and we can clean house next turn. And that’s what has to happen.”Fears about the two nominees were compounded by Trump’s comments on Meet the Press on Sunday when he said he wouldn’t tell the justice department to prosecute his political enemies, but added threateningly that the House members on the panel that investigated the January 6 insurrection “should go to jail”.Ex-justice department prosecutors worry that Trump’s two picks will exact retribution against Trump foes, undermining the independence of both the justice department and the FBI and damaging the rule of law.“The rhetoric of Bondi and Patel is incredibly harmful to public trust in our government institutions and the reputations of individual public servants,” said Barbara McQuade, a former top prosecutor in eastern Michigan who now teaches law at the University of Michigan. “There’s absolutely no public evidence of wrongdoing to ‘rig’ the 2020 election.“Pledges to prosecute the prosecutors and investigate the investigators based on the complete absence of evidence is reckless because even if investigations do not materialize, unhinged members of the public will hear these bombastic accusations as a call to action.”Similarly, the former justice department inspector general Michael Bromwich said: “Bondi and Patel are election deniers, in the face of the adjudication of more than 60 cases rejecting claims of election fraud in 2020. This is alarming.“Members of the Senate judiciary committee have a duty to explore the basis of those often-repeated beliefs. If Bondi and Patel maintain that the election was stolen, they either are liars – and lying under oath is a crime – or they are so detached from reality that they shouldn’t be trusted to run a two-person convenience store, much less the DoJ and the FBI.”The former federal prosecutor and Columbia law professor Daniel Richman likens Trump’s nominees to his heavy reliance in his real estate career on Roy Cohn, the late mafia lawyer and chief counsel to rightwing senator Joseph McCarthy.“Still casting about for a Roy Cohn replacement, Trump has gone to people like Bondi and Patel whose loyalty comes from their utter dependence on his favor,” Richman said.Richman added: “But their lack of experience with the agencies he wants them to lead promises a rocky road ahead, both for them and the agencies.”Richman noted: “Presidents can pardon and otherwise kill cases and his loyal minions can disrupt agency operations, but I suspect they will soon be railing at what they call ‘resistance’ and what everyone else calls rule-following.”Such concerns about both nominees have been reinforced by their eager echoing of Trump’s conspiratorial obsession of going after “deep state” foes, as well as their old ties to Trump and backgrounds.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPatel, who lacks experience leading an agency, shares Trump’s obsession and vindictiveness towards political critics and the press who Trump has branded an “enemy of the people”.Last year in his book Government Gangsters, Patel went further in an appendix where he included 60 “members of the Executive Branch Deep State” that consisted largely of top Democrats and Trump critics. Patel also wrote that Trump “must fire the top ranks of the FBI”.“Then, all those who manipulated evidence, hid exculpatory information, or in any way abused their authority for political ends must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Patel said.Patel’s incendiary comments and writings could lead to confirmation problems by the US Senate during hearings. Chris Wray, who Trump appointed as director after firing James Comey in 2017 and who Trump has often criticized, has three years left in his 10-year term, so he would have to resign or be fired to make way for Patel.“Kash Patel is manifestly unqualified,” said the ex-federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig. “Given his intemperate support for retribution against the deep state and Trump’s political ‘foes’, he is temperamentally unqualified for the job.”While Bondi is an equally staunch Trump loyalist, she is expected to have fewer confirmation problems. Trump tapped her for the post within hours of his first candidate for AG, the ex-Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, dropping out after serious allegations arose of sexual misconduct that led to a House ethics inquiry while he was in office.Still, Bondi’s vociferous election denialism and attacks on the so-called “deep state” represent a sharp break historically with the rhetoric of attorneys general which critics are raising strong fears about.After Trump’s defeat in 2020, Bondi co-chaired the law and justice section at the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute, which has supplied a few of Trump’s new picks, including billionaire Linda McMahon for education secretary.Bondi also spent several years as a lobbyist for the powerhouse Florida firm led by the Republican fundraiser Brian Ballard, where her clients included Amazon, General Motors, and the government of Qatar.Often seen as a political operator, Bondi has ties to Trump that go back further and have raised some red flags. When Bondi was Florida’s attorney general in 2013, Trump donated $25,000 to a Pac backing her re-election. The donation’s timing drew scrutiny given that Bondi’s spokesperson told a newspaper just days before the donation that the AG’s office was reviewing a class-action lawsuit by New York which had been filed against Trump University for fraud.Veteran prosecutors warn that if the Senate confirms Bondi and Patel they could create a climate for violence against Trump’s foes.“I’m more worried about threats, harassment and political violence than I am in the success of baseless investigations,” McQuade said. “Bondi and Patel will be unable to get bogus charges past a grand jury, a judge or a trial jury, but someone who believes this deep state nonsense could decide to take matters into their own hands.”Looking ahead, Bromwich stressed too that if Patel and Bondi pursued baseless inquiries, they could boomerang.“Lawyers and investigators who willingly participate in the pursuit of a revenge and retribution agenda risk losing not only the respect of their peers but their future livelihoods. In particular, lawyers who initiate investigations and pursue prosecutions without factual predicates risk being the subject of ethics complaints and the loss of their law licenses.” More