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      Republican Adam Kinzinger: election deniers won’t ‘go away organically’

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      Republican Adam Kinzinger: election deniers won’t ‘go away organically’January 6 committee member speaks days after panel voted to subpoena Trump and says ex-president ‘required by law to come in’ Election deniers are not “going to go away organically”, and if they are ever to vanish, US voters must signal “that truth matters” beginning with the upcoming midterms, according to a Republican member of the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.Adam Kinzinger’s latest remarks on the baseless insistence by Donald Trump’s allies that fraudsters denied him a second term in the Oval Office and handed the 2020 election to Joe Biden came Sunday, days after the House January 6 select committee unanimously moved to subpoena the former president’s testimony over his knowledge of the deadly Capitol attack.Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on the nine-member January 6 panel, has long called the Capitol attack the inevitable culmination of Trump’s lies – buoyed up by supporters in and out of elected office – that he was robbed of victory over his Democratic rival Biden. On Sunday he made arguably one of his most impassioned pleas yet for voters to realize the only way to minimize chances of a Capitol attack repeat, or even an escalation, was to punish candidates denying the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential race at the ballot box.“I don’t think this is just going to go away organically – this is going to take the American people really standing up and making the decision that truth matters,” Kinzinger said on ABC’s This Week when host George Stephanopoulos mentioned the large number of midterm candidates in state and federal races amplifying Trump’s electoral lies.“I don’t care if you’re a Republican or Democrat because the battle right now is truth and the battle is the preservation of democracy.”Kinzinger, in his conversation with Stephanopoulos on Sunday, reiterated that the subpoena which the House Capitol attack panel was working on issuing to Trump wouldn’t be a request. Trump’s rambling, 14-page reply to the subpoena, titled “the presidential election of 2020 was rigged and stolen”, never said whether he intends to comply – he once was eager to speak on his own behalf before the panel, but he since has appeared to grasp the potential pitfalls of making statements to investigators.Nonetheless, “he’s required by law to come in” and either testify or invoke his rights against self-incrimination, Kinzinger said. “And he can ramble and push back all he wants – that’s the requirement for a congressional subpoena to come in.”The Illinois congressman said he anticipated a negotiation between the committee and Trump’s camp about whether the former president’s testimony in front of the panel would be live. The panel has rarely accepted testimony with conditions from any witnesses, with the notable exception of former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson.Kinzinger also wouldn’t say whether he believed federal prosecutors would charge Trump with criminal contempt of Congress if he defies the subpoena.“Look, that’s a – that’s a bridge we cross if we have to get there,” Kinzinger said.Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon was found guilty of criminal contempt of Congress in July after he refused to provide testimony and documents subpoenaed by the House January 6 committee. But Trump could avail himself of immunity which Bannon could not.At least nine deaths, including the suicides of officers traumatized by having to respond to the scene, have been linked to the Capitol attack staged by Trump supporters on the day Congress was supposed to certify his defeat at the hands of Biden.Members of the congressional committee investigating the attack have said the subpoena to Trump is necessary because his singular role at the center of events leading up to January 6 required a full accounting.They reportedly believe Trump’s testimony could resolve a number of pending issues, including his contacts with political operatives at the Trump war room at an upscale hotel near the Capitol on the day before the building was attacked.The work of Kinzinger and fellow Republican Liz Cheney on the House January 6 committee has been costly for both. Cheney lost a bid for another term to Trump-backed primary challenger Harriet Hageman.Kinzinger, whose office has reportedly been inundated with death threats, chose to not run for re-election and has started a political action committee, Country First, which in part aims to recruit candidates from both parties for local election clerk offices who wouldn’t subvert the results of races.“I would love to say this was going to happen easily,” Kinzinger said. “It’s going to take everybody’s work out there working hard because I don’t think you want to leave your kids a country … like what we’ve been living in.”TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsRepublicansDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

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      Republicans are trying to win by spreading three false talking points. Here’s the truth | Robert Reich

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      Republicans are trying to win by spreading three false talking points. Here’s the truthRobert ReichRepublicans want midterm voters to believe lies about crime, inflation and taxes. This is what they’re claiming – followed by the facts Republicans are telling three lies they hope will swing the midterms. They involve crime, inflation, and taxes. Here’s what Republicans are claiming, followed by the facts.1. They claim that crime is rising because Democrats have been “soft” on crimeThis is pure rubbish. Rising crime rates are due to the proliferation of guns, which Republicans refuse to control.Here are the facts:While violent crime rose 28% from 2019 to 2020, gun homicides rose 35%. States that have weakened gun laws have seen gun crime surge. Clearly, a major driver of the national increase in violence is the easy availability of guns.The violence can’t be explained by any of the Republican talking points about “soft-on-crime” Democrats.Lack of police funding? Baloney. Democratic-run major cities spend 38% more on policing per person than Republican-run cities, and 80% of the largest cities increased police funding from 2019 to 2022.Criminal justice reforms? Wrong. Data shows that wherever bail reforms have been implemented, re-arrest rates remain stable. Data from major cities shows no connection between the policies of progressive prosecutors and changes in crime rates.Research has repeatedly shown that crime is rising faster in Republican, Trump-supporting states. The thinktank Third Way found that in 2020, per capita murder rates were 40% higher in states won by Trump than in those won by Joe Biden.Let’s be clear: it’s been Republican policies that have made it easier for people to get and carry guns. Republicans are lying about the real cause of rising crime to protect their patrons – gun manufacturers.2. They claim that inflation is due to Biden’s spending, and wage increasesBaloney. The major cause of the current inflation is the global post-pandemic shortage of all sorts of things, coupled with Putin’s war in Ukraine and China’s lockdowns.The major domestic cause of the current inflation is big corporations that have been taking advantage of inflation by raising their prices higher than their increasing costs.Here are the facts:Inflation can’t be explained by any of the Republican talking points.Biden’s spending? Rubbish again. That can’t be causing our current inflation because inflation has broken out everywhere around the world, often at much higher rates than in the US.Democrats shouldn’t focus only on abortion in the midterms. That’s a mistake | Bernie SandersRead moreBesides, heavy spending by the US government began in 2020, before the Biden administration, in order to protect Americans and the economy from the ravages of Covid-19 – and it was necessary.American workers getting wage increases? Wages can’t be pushing inflation because wages have been increasing at a slower pace than prices – leaving most workers worse off.The biggest domestic culprits are big corporations using inflation as an excuse to raise prices above their own cost increases, resulting in near-record profits.US corporate profits are at the highest margins since 1950 – while consumers are paying through the nose.Let’s be clear: the biggest domestic cause of inflation is corporate power. Republicans are lying about this to protect their big corporate patrons.3. They say Democrats voted to hire an army of IRS agents who will audit and harass the middle classNonsense. The IRS won’t be going after the middle class. It will be going after ultra-wealthy tax cheats.Here are the facts:The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in July, provides funding to begin to get IRS staffing back to what it was before 2010, after which Republicans diminished staff by roughly 30%, despite increases since then in the number of Americans filing tax returns.The extra staff are needed to boost efforts against high-end tax evasion – which is more difficult to root out, because the ultra-wealthy hire squads of accountants and tax attorneys to hide their taxable incomes.The treasury department and the IRS have made it clear that audit rates for households earning $400,000 or under will remain the same.Let’s be clear: the IRS needs extra resources to go after rich tax cheats. Republicans are lying about what the IRS will do with the new funding to protect their ultra-wealthy patrons.None of these three lies is as brazen and damaging as Trump’s big lie. But they’re all being used by Republican candidates in these last weeks before the midterms.Know the truth and share it.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
      TopicsUS midterm elections 2022OpinionUS politicsRepublicansUS economycommentReuse this content More

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      Divided midterms: parties play up different issues as US elections loom

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      Divided midterms: parties play up different issues as US elections loomDemocrats and Republicans are largely talking past each other as they campaign, with little to no overlap on what they consider major issues Ron Johnson’s priorities were clear. “We have a huge problem with skyrocketing crime,” insisted the US senator for Wisconsin, accusing his debate opponent, Mandela Barnes, of pushing to reduce cash bail, release violent criminals and slash police funding.Minutes later it was Barnes’s turn to go on the offensive. Johnson, the lieutenant governor said, had described the end of the constitutional right to abortion as a “victory” and shown himself to be “callous” and “out of touch”. Barnes promised to codify that right into law if elected.US midterms 2022: the key racesRead moreA casual observer could have been forgiven for thinking the two candidates were fighting two different elections. For in split-screen America, Democrats and Republicans are largely talking past each other as they campaign for midterms that will decide control of Congress on 8 November.Each party is playing to its perceived strengths. A recent poll by the political research firm Public Opinion Strategies for NBC News found that 90% of voters would prefer Republican control of Congress for the issue of immigration and the border, 65% favour Republicans on crime and 60% want Republicans to handle jobs and the economy.The same survey showed that 86% of voters would prefer Democratic control of Congress to address climate change, 74% favor Democrats on guns, 71% prefer Democrats on abortion and 67% choose Democrats to cope with threats to democracy. The divide is unusually stark.“In past campaigns, the top one or two issues in the election were closely contested and divided between the two political parties,” said Bill McInturff, a partner of Public Opinion Strategies. “This election is different. Each party holds a wide marginal advantage on a distinct set of issues.”McInturff added: “America is more polarised than at any point in the last 40-plus years. Partisans have retreated to their own corners, with limited engagement between partisans, and very little to no overlap of agreement on any major issue.”Perhaps the most vivid illustration of America’s divide is abortion. In June the supreme court’s rightwing majority overturned the landmark Roe v Wade ruling that had enshrined it as a constitutional right for nearly half a century. The political consequences could be profound.The court’s decision prompted a surge among women registering to vote in some states. In conservative Kansas, people overwhelmingly voted to continue to protect abortion in the state constitution.The upshot is a Democratic campaign intensely focused on mobilising women and young people around reproductive rights. Citing data from Bully Pulpit Interactive, the Axios website reported that Democrats have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook ads about abortion over the past three months.They were handed more ammunition when Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator for South Carolina, proposed a national abortion ban at 15 weeks, and when Herschel Walker, who supports an absolute national ban and is running for a Senate seat in Georgia, was reported to have encouraged and paid for an abortion in 2009 for a woman with whom he later fathered a child.Just as Democrats are eager to talk about abortion rights, Republicans – who spent decades promoting it as a hot button topic – are now equally eager to avoid the topic. Candidates are waffling around it in debates and interviews, deleting hardline positions from their campaign websites and seeking to change the subject whenever they can.But Democrats can take nothing for granted. Writing in the Guardian this week, Bernie Sanders, a senator for Vermont, said he was “alarmed” to hear that Democratic candidates are being advised that their closing arguments should focus only on the right to choose. “In my view, while the abortion issue must remain on the front burner, it would be political malpractice for Democrats to ignore the state of the economy and allow Republican lies and distortions to go unanswered,” Sanders wrote.James Carville, a veteran Democratic strategist, also struck a note of caution, telling the Associated Press: “A lot of these consultants think if all we do is run abortion spots that will win for us. I don’t think so. It’s a good issue. But if you just sit there and they’re pummeling you on crime and pummeling you on the cost of living, you’ve got to be more aggressive than just yelling abortion every other word.”Democrats have other cards to play: the climate crisis, gun safety and threats to democracy. While the last of these may be complex and abstract to some voters, former president Donald Trump’s continued scandals and campaign rallies are helping to keep it front and centre.House Republicans, meanwhile, made their priorities clear with last month’s launch of a “Commitment to America” policy agenda, emphasising the economy, crime, freedom of choice and government accountability. They claim that Democratic rule has produced 40-year high inflation, 12 cities with record murder rates, a 60% increase in petrol prices, 3.5m illegal border crossings under Joe Biden and record-high drug overdoses.Some of the attacks could be touching a nerve. Only 36% of Americans say they approve of Biden’s handling of the economy, according to a poll by the Associated Press-Norc Center for Public Affairs Research, while 63% disapprove. Although the president has blamed rising energy and food prices on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, critics argue that his $1.9tn coronavirus relief package last year was excessive.In a mirror of Republicans’s dissembling around abortion, Democrats are being forced on the defensive despite low unemployment. Biden told CNN this week: “I don’t think there will be a recession. If it is, it’ll be a very slight recession. That is, we’ll move down slightly.”With Democrats similarly reluctant to discuss border security, Republicans believe that they hold the winning hand. Ed Rogers, a political consultant who worked in the Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush administrations, said: “Both parties are talking about what they can talk about. Republicans have the big four: inflation/economy; crime/lawlessness; public education, underreported in the US; the border/immigration.“The Democrats have abortion and name-calling – you’re a fascist, you’re a Nazi, you’re an extremist. That’s all they have. I can’t believe how the Democrats have abandoned the big four. They just don’t talk about them. They’re in a swirl of denial, of obfuscation, of defeat.“They just abandoned the ground. They’re not looking at the polling and selfishly saying, ‘Hey, gang, look at what people care about. We should have a well-crafted, affirmative message about these things.’ They didn’t have that meeting this cycle for some reason. It’s inexplicable to me.”For voters, it can often seem like two campaigns running in parallel with little overlap. Instead of coming at the same issue from different sides, now the issues themselves are different. One team is playing baseball, the other cricket. Longtime political observers say it used not to be this way.John Zogby, an author and pollster, said: “Usually there’s one set of issues. Pro, con, yay, nay. Not always but generally the economy. In the mid-90s crime was a big issue and there was no changing the subject. ‘Here’s our approach, here’s their approach.’ There was a common set of issues with different approaches. This is an election about different realities.”He added: “We talked politics even when I was a little kid and there were always disagreements but what makes this so unique is, as [former White House counselor] Kellyanne Conway pointed out, there’s ‘alternative facts’ that are involved.”The parties’ supporters do agree on one issue: last month a Quinnipiac University poll found that 69% of Democrats and 69% of Republicans say that democracy is “in danger of collapse”. But they have fundamentally divergent explanations: Democrats blame Trump and “ultra-Maga Republicans”, Republicans condemn Biden and socialism.Biden ran for election as a moderate promising to heal divisions and he still peppers his speeches with an emphasis on the “United States of America”. But the past two years have seen continued acrimony and even talk of civil war as Trump continues to dominate an extremist Republican party.US midterms 2022: the key candidates who threaten democracyRead moreNot everyone believes that the trend is irreversible, however. The Common Ground Committee, a non-partisan organisation, has launched a “score card” to assess the degree to which elected public officials and candidates for office seek points of agreement. Bruce Bond, co-founder and chief executive of the committee, argues that bipartisanship can actually be a selling point in the midterms.He said via Zoom: “Because politics have become national and if I’m a Republican I’m going talk about inflation, and if I’m a Democrat I’m going to talk about the Dobbs decision [by the supreme court on abortion], there’s now a little bit more interest in saying, ‘I have this strong position on this issue and I agree with my base but I also can work with people from the other side’.”Bond pointed to the example of Tim Ryan, a Democratic candidate for the Senate in Ohio, who has said he wants to represent “the exhausted majority” and work across the aisle. “What we’re seeing is that the candidates recognise that people are tired of the political divide. If you’re going to talk about the issues that you know your guys care about, that’s not going to be enough.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022The ObserverUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      ‘Devoid of shame’: January 6 cop Michael Fanone on Trump’s Republican party

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      Interview‘Devoid of shame’: January 6 cop Michael Fanone on Trump’s Republican partyJ Oliver Conroy A pro-Trump mob almost killed him – and some politicians want to pretend it never happened Almost a year after pro-Trump rioters at the US Capitol beat and electrocuted Michael Fanone nearly to death – causing him to go into cardiac arrest, lose consciousness for four minutes and become one of the most famous police officers in America – he decided to end his 20-year law enforcement career with a resignation letter written on a paper napkin.Capitol attack officer Fanone hits out at ‘weasel’ McCarthy in startling interviewRead more“I wrote, ‘Go fuck yourselves,’” Fanone recalled, neck tattoos peeking from under a dark sport coat and grey-streaked beard, as he dined in one of the quieter corners of a steakhouse in Manhattan.A friend, he said, translated his resignation into more formal English: “You know, ‘I’m grateful for the time and memories here …’ Blah, blah, blah, blah.”While months of medical treatment had helped Fanone mostly recover from his injuries, his fury at politicians who wanted to erase January 6 from memory remained – and his desire to name and shame “sniveling weasel bitches” such as the Republican House leader, Kevin McCarthy, often and with an irreverence that was making his police career untenable.“What continues to boil my blood,” said Fanone, a one-time Trump voter, is how the Capitol attack “has become so politicized. It’s to the point where I have this adversarial relationship with most Republicans, who I see as either indifferent to what happened or on the side of the insurrectionists.”What also hadn’t gone away were the fellow cops who whispered behind his back or exited a room when he entered – because they were Trump supporters who resented his criticisms of the former president, or because they thought he was a showboat exaggerating his experience at the Capitol for money or attention.Fanone, a vice-officer who became one of the star witnesses of the January 6 hearings, could no longer do undercover work and was a political hot potato. After his superiors re-assigned him to IT (“I have no background in it. I type with one finger”) and he arrived to find a desk draped in plastic with no chair or computer, he decided, five years short of his pension, to quit.Now Fanone is adjusting to a strange new life. He declined an offer to pose for Playgirl but accepted a CNN contract as a law enforcement analyst. Learning not to curse on air has been hard – “I did get in a lot of trouble,” he has said, “for saying I thought history was going to shit on Mike Pence’s head” – so, on the infrequent occasions he actually joins a segment, he’ll bring a notecard: DON’T SAY FUCK.He has published a memoir, Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul, written with John Shiffman, an investigative reporter for Reuters. He has friends in surprisingly high places – Sean Penn once took him to dinner, and Nancy Pelosi is known to check in at 3am.Yet his financial situation, he said, isn’t what everyone assumes. His medical and insurance bills are high. He lives in a one-bedroom outfitted with lawn furniture and he’s embarrassed he doesn’t have more space for his four daughters when they visit.He spends as much time as possible with them. When he’s not doing that, he does quiet, solitary things. He lifts weights and most days runs six to eight miles; hangs out with his “failed hunting dog”, Buddy; takes to the woods to stalk deer and turkey; ruminates about the future of the country.“I’m not looking to fucking make money off my experiences on January 6, outside of feeding my family,” he said. “If people have a problem with me writing a book, they can kiss my ass.”He chewed on a steak salad and added, very deliberately: “All I want is to talk about my experience, educate a few people, maybe engage in constructive conversation about police reform. After there’s accountability for January 6, I hope to ride off into the sunset of obscurity, never to be heard from again.”Fanone speaks in a south Maryland drawl, redolent of a crab fisherman or a character on The Wire. The grandson of a steel mill worker and the son of an attorney and a social worker, he briefly attended Georgetown Prep, one of the nation’s elite schools, but it didn’t stick – after a year he was asked “not to return”.His parents separated when he was young, so he split time between his father’s white-shoe world and his mother’s more middle-class or blue-collar one. After dropping out of high school, he worked construction and eventually earned a GED.He started his law enforcement career with the US Capitol police but guard duty bored him. After a very public exchange of views with a colleague – “two Capitol cops in uniform brawling in broad daylight on Independence Avenue” – he quit to join the larger Metropolitan police department.Fanone was full of “piss and vinegar”. A vice posting suited him fine. He spent much of his time undercover or hiding in dumpsters or trees (locals called him Spider-mMan). Over the years he grew less hotheaded and more focused on meticulous operations that would hold up in court – and nail traffickers.On the grey morning of 6 January 2021, as Trump supporters converged on Congress, Fanone was supposed to be working a drug op with his partner, Jimmy Albright, and his most trusted informant, Leslie Perkins, a transgender black sex worker who has since died of illness.The drug op never happened. Fanone had assumed the Capitol protest was under control but he began hearing unsettling radio calls. An order to don “hard gear”. A plea for munitions. An ominous request for the FBI hostage rescue team.He drove 70mph to his station, arriving as a commander called an “officer down” on behalf of his entire unit – something Fanone had never heard in two decades as a cop. He changed into a uniform and grabbed a helmet, a decision he believes may have saved his life.At the Capitol, he and Albright descended to the Lower West Tunnel, where they had heard the situation was dire. Fanone’s bodycam recorded footage that will probably go down as one of the most visceral documents of January 6.Inside the tunnel, 40 exhausted officers, formed into something resembling a huge rugby scrum, were trying to stop a crowd of thousands forcing its way through a door.Many of the rioters had come prepared, with gas masks, body armor, helmets, bear spray. Some wielded stolen riot shields. In contrast, many of the cops, like Fanone, had “self-deployed” without gas masks or other gear. There was vomit on the floor.“Hold the line!” a commander, Ray Kyle, was shouting. “Do not give up that door! We are not going to lose that door!”Fanone and Albright pushed forward. At the front, Fanone confronted what he describes in his memoir as a “human battering ram” – in his bodycam footage you can hear him grunting and gasping as hundreds of pounds of force presses down. Yet for a moment, despite everything, the police actually seemed to be gaining ground.Then someone shouted: “Knife!”As Fanone glanced to see what was happening, a rioter seized him by the neck and dragged him into the crowd, yelling: “I got one!”A news photograph captured the moment Fanone was enveloped by the mob. He is surrounded by heaving bodies, his face grimacing in fear. A rioter is beating him with the pole of a “Blue Lives Matter” flag – meant to signify support for law enforcement.Blows landed from every direction. Hands fumbled at his gun. Soon Fanone was 50ft from the tunnel. He tried to turn back. A Three Percenter militiaman blocked his path.Someone pressed a taser to Fanone’s neck and repeatedly electrocuted him. He heard someone say: “Kill him with his own gun!”“I’ve got kids!” Fanone screamed. “I’ve got kids!”At that point some of the rioters intervened. Someone shouted: “We’re better than this!” People grabbed Fanone and bore him back to the police line.Fanone stumbled into the tunnel and lost consciousness. He came to as his partner prepared to drive him to hospital.“No dreams,” Fanone told me. “No flashbacks.” In fact, he can’t remember anything that happened between the time he shouted he had children and when he woke up in the tunnel. The hospital diagnosed cardiac arrest and traumatic brain injury. The rioters had bestowed the sixth concussion of Fanone’s life and seared the flesh of his neck. He was in agony but, with a narcotics officer’s wariness, refused most pain medication.Only while recovering did Fanone learn of the full mendacity of January 6: Trump’s dying Roman emperor routine; Pence’s tepid decision to do the right thing; the Missouri senator Josh Hawley’s choice to stoke the mob then flee “like a bitch”.Later, angered by news that 21 House Republicans had voted against awarding a medal to the cops who defended the Capitol, Fanone forced a meeting with McCarthy. He was joined by a fellow officer, Harry Dunn, and Gladys Sicknick, whose son, officer Brian Sicknick, died the day after the attack.Fanone asked McCarthy “about certain members of the GOP I call the ‘tinfoil hat brigade’ – Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert. These people have risen to the level of not just an embarrassment within the Republican party, but to humanity.”After some “verbal masturbation”, Fanone said, McCarthy effectively admitted that he was unwilling, or unable, to control radicals in his party. Fanone secretly recorded the entire conversation – and leaked it.It had little to no effect. Nor did Fanone’s testimony at the January 6 hearings.“These people are devoid of shame,” he said. “There’s no way to shame them into doing what’s right. And that has a lot to do with Trump as the ultimate ‘ends-justify-means’ guy.”The conspiracy sphere even painted Fanone as part of a false-flag operation, “like a love child of Nancy Pelosi that’s grown in a petri dish and has been quietly part of some sleeper cell that was awakened for this event”, as he put it to Rolling Stone.A self-described redneck, Fanone said he understands Trump’s appeal, even if it’s a fraud. He voted for Trump in 2016 because he seemed more pro-police than Hillary Clinton. He came to regret it. Fanone’s ex-wife and three of his daughters are Asian American. During Covid, he was angered by Trump’s insinuating references to the “China virus”.Fanone exudes discipline. Early in our meal he carefully removed an onion ring garnish from his salad, and did not touch the fries I ordered for the table. But his foot fluttered with nervous energy under the table.Several cops who defended the Capitol later took their own lives. Fanone has described dark moments of his own, sitting and staring at his gun.“There are a lot of officers suffering in silence or self-medicating with alcohol. It’s probably going to lead to more tragedies down the line.”Unchecked review: how Trump dodged two impeachments … and the January 6 committee?Read moreA waiter recognized Fanone and thanked him for what he did at the Capitol. Several diners did the same. It happens daily, he said.“I try to always talk to them. I don’t see that as a chore. It’s part of why I’m speaking out. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make me feel better. I wish it did.”Fanone doesn’t know what the future holds. He might return to construction. He’d also be interested in serving on a policing commission, as an intermediary, pro-cop and pro-reform. He rejects calls to defund the police – training is the first thing cut, he said – but is sympathetic to Black Lives Matter. He’s fond of saying that overthrowing a CVS drugstore is different from overthrowing the government.That’s the only office he’d be interested in holding. Look at George Washington, he said. “When it came to the presidency, they had to drag that motherfucker – all 6ft 4in – kicking and screaming. After his term was done, he couldn’t get home fast enough.”He added: “And don’t volunteer me. I don’t want it.”TopicsBooksUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS policingRepublicansUS CongressPolitics booksinterviewsReuse this content More

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      Giuliani names Trump election deniers as witnesses in legal ethics case

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      Giuliani names Trump election deniers as witnesses in legal ethics caseDoug Mastriano, Jenna Ellis and Peter Navarro among those named in case related to attempt to overturn Pennsylvania result Facing a Washington DC legal ethics prosecution over his role in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani has turned to a cast of characters from that failed effort.Giuliani review: Andrew Kirtzman’s definitive life of Trump’s last lackeyRead moreA witness list filed by lawyers for Giuliani on Friday included Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for governor in Pennsylvania; the former Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis; and Christina Bobb, an attorney currently caught up in Trump’s fight with the US Department of Justice over the retention of classified records.Also among those named were the former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi; Peter Navarro, a former Trump trade adviser charged with contempt of Congress in the January 6 investigation; former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski; and Bernard Kerik, a former New York police commissioner who Trump pardoned of felonies that sent him to jail.Phil Waldron, a former army colonel turned Texas bar owner who pushed baseless electoral fraud claims, was also on the witness list.Giuliani is accused of mounting a frivolous election challenge in Pennsylvania – one of four states, with Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, on which the attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s presidential election victory focused and which Trump this week named in an intemperate response to a subpoena from the House January 6 committee.The DC office of disciplinary counsel intends to call Giuliani as a witness. The former mayor appears on his own list too.Giuliani has said he had a “good faith basis” for contesting mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania.But his work as Trump’s personal attorney – for which he has famously struggled to secure payment – landed him in legal jeopardy on a number of fronts.Giuliani’s role in approaches to Ukraine for political dirt on Trump opponents including Biden landed him in the middle of Trump’s first impeachment.Trump’s second impeachment, for inciting the Capitol riot on 6 January 2021, was the result of the failure of legal attempts to overturn the 2020 election.In Georgia, Giuliani has been named as the target of a criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the election result there.In New York, he has been sued by Dominion Voting Systems, a maker of election machinery.Giuliani is also suspended from practicing law in New York state.Writing for Slate, the Harvard law professor Laurence H Tribe and Dennis Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor, said Giuliani and the law professor John Eastman were “the two chief ‘generals’ [who] orchestrat[ed] Trump’s abuse of the law to overturn the election”.The authors added: “In joining the bar, lawyers take an oath to support the US constitution much like the one that Article VI of the constitution requires of all public officials. Lawyers who betrayed that oath in ways that led to the deadly insurrection of January 6 are no better than a physician who violates the Hippocratic Oath to ‘do no harm’.”The complaint in the DC case says Giuliani violated two Pennsylvania rules that bar attorneys from bringing frivolous proceedings without a basis in law or fact and prohibit conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice. The charges can lead to the suspension of a license to practice or disbarment.The hearing is set for December.TopicsRudy GiulianiDonald TrumpUS elections 2020US politicsRepublicansLaw (US)newsReuse this content More

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      Senate candidate Herschel Walker brandishes 'police badge' in Georgia debate – video

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      The Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker addressed his past claims about being a law enforcement officer by producing what he said was a police badge. The former college football and NFL star, who is endorsed by Donald Trump, was accused of ‘pretending to be a police officer’ by his rival, Democratic senator Raphael Warnock, during a debate on Friday. Saying ‘I have to respond to that,’ Walker produced his badge. Walker has never been a trained law enforcement officer, though he has law enforcement endorsements 

      Herschel Walker denies abortion ban support and brandishes ‘police badge’ in Georgia debate More

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      Peter Thiel’s midterm bet: the billionaire seeking to disrupt America’s democracy

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      AnalysisPeter Thiel’s midterm bet: the billionaire seeking to disrupt America’s democracyAndrew Gumbel in Los AngelesRe-energized this election cycle, the tech entrepreneur joins other mega-donors apparently out to undercut the political system Peter Thiel is far from the first billionaire who has wielded his fortune to try to influence the course of American politics. But in an election year when democracy itself is said to be on the ballot, he stands out for assailing a longstanding governing system that he has described as “deranged” and in urgent need of “course correction”.The German-born investor and tech entrepreneur, a Silicon Valley “disrupter” who helped found PayPal alongside Elon Musk and made his fortune as one of the earliest investors in Facebook, has catapulted himself into the top ranks of the mega-donor class by pouring close to $30m into this year’s midterm elections.Democracy, poisoned: America’s elections are being attacked at every levelRead moreHe’s not merely favoring one party over another, but is supporting candidates who deny the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election as president and have, in their different ways, called for the pillars of the American establishment to be toppled entirely.Thiel’s priorities this midterm cycle have partly aligned with those of Donald Trump, with whom he has had an on-again, off-again relationship since writing him a $1.25m check during the 2016 presidential campaign.Thiel, like Trump, has made it his business to end the careers of what he calls “the traitorous 10”, Republican House members who voted to impeach Trump in the wake of the January 6 insurrection. Four of these members opted not to run for re-election at all, and four more, including Liz Cheney, the vice-chair of the House committee investigating January 6, went down in the primaries.But there are also signs that Thiel is thinking around and beyond the former president. The lion’s share of his largesse – $28m and counting – has been directed towards two business proteges who, with his help, have established themselves as gadfly rightwing darlings: JD Vance, the best-selling author of the blue-collar memoir Hillbilly Elegy, who is running for Senate in Ohio, and Blake Masters, a self-styled “anti-progressive” and anti-globalist who is running for Senate in Arizona.Over the past decade, ever since the supreme court dramatically loosened the rules of political campaign giving in its Citizens United decision, Thiel has placed sizable bets on candidates who are not only conservative but have sought to challenge longstanding institutional traditions and break the Republican party’s own norms: Senator Ted Cruz in Texas and Senator Josh Hawley in Missouri as well as Trump himself.Masters, who has campaigned on the notion that “psychopaths are running the country right now” and spoken approvingly of the anti-establishment philosophy of the 1990s Unabomber, and Vance, a frequent speaker on the university circuit during his book tour days who now says “universities are the enemy”, fit the same mould. They and Thiel all have ties to a branch of the New Right known as NatCon, whose adherents believe, broadly, that the establishment needs to be torn down, much as Thiel and his fellow Silicon Valley disrupters believed two decades ago that the future lay in destroying longstanding business models and practices.Thiel himself opined as far back as 2009 that he no longer believed democracy to be compatible with freedom and expressed “little hope that voting will make things better”. While a member of Trump’s presidential transition team in 2016, he flashed his institution-busting instincts by proposing that a leading climate change skeptic, William Happer, be appointed as White House science adviser. He also pushed for a libertarian bitcoin entrepreneur who did not believe in drug trials to head up the Food and Drug Administration.Conservatives could soon be swiping right on Peter Thiel-backed dating appRead moreSuch proposals were too much even by Trump’s iconoclastic standards. Steve Bannon, Trump’s ultra-right campaign manager and political strategist, told a Thiel biographer: “Peter’s idea of disrupting government is out there.”Thiel did not respond to a request for an interview, and his representatives did not respond to multiple invitations to comment.Masters and Vance also did not respond to inquiries.Democracy under attack: the mega-donorsThiel sat out the 2020 election but appears to have been re-energized by the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump’s claims of a stolen presidential election and the January 6 insurrection. Addressing a NatCon convention this time last year, he denounced the “incredible derangement of various forms of thought, political life, scientific life and the sense-making machinery generally in this country”.Liberal democracy, in his view, had turned the United States government into a dissent-squashing Ministry of Truth working toward a “homogenizing, brain-dead, one-world state” – a problem to which only rightwing nationalism could provide an “all-important corrective”.“We’re close to a Toto moment, a little dog pulling aside the curtain on the holy of holies only to find there’s nobody there,” he told the crowd. “We always think of democracy as a good thing. But … where do you shift from the wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds? When does it become a mob, a racket, a totalitarian lie?”Such views might be easy to write off as the eccentricities of a wealthy man but for the money that Thiel has spent buying influence and supporting like-minded candidates – thanks in large part to a campaign financing system that, while still capping contributions to individual campaigns, allows unlimited funding of nominally outside groups and political action committees.Campaign finance experts see Thiel as a symptom of a much broader problem: a political environment in which a small group of mega-donors are growing ever bolder in the size of the checks they write and the erosion of any nominal firewall between the war chests run by candidates and the funds controlled by outside groups dedicated to their success.America’s billionaire class is funding anti-democratic forces | Robert ReichRead more“It does seem to be getting worse,” said Chisun Lee, an expert on campaign finance who directs the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government program at New York University. “Outside spending in this federal midterm cycle is more than double the last midterm cycle. Since Citizens United, just 12 mega-donors, eight of them billionaires, have paid one dollar out of every 13 spent in federal elections. And now we’re seeing a troubling new trend … that some mega-donors are sponsoring campaigns that attack the fundamentals of democracy itself.”Thiel’s spending has been dwarfed this year by at least three other mega-donors – Soros ($128m to the Democrats), shipping products tycoon Richard Uihlein ($53m to Republicans) and hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin ($50m to Republicans). And Thiel has some way to go to match the consistent giving, cycle after cycle, of the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson, the late Las Vegas casino magnate.Many experts also believe the attack on democracy began long before it became as explicit as Thiel has made it, because the whole point of funneling large amounts of money into the political system is to sway policy away from the will of the majority to the narrow interests of the donors and their friends.This ability to control the policy agenda drives spending even more than the desire to see specific candidates win, says the Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, whose 2011 book Republic, Lost offers an enduringly devastating analysis of the relationship between money and political influence. And the spending is likely only to increase.“You’re going to see much, much bigger individual contributions and an acceleration of contributions to Super Pacs [like the ones established to support Vance and Masters],” Lessig said. “The candidates and the Super Pacs can’t coordinate on spending, but that doesn’t mean they can’t coordinate on the fundraising. Since the Super Pacs are outspending candidates by orders of magnitude, it’s all a dance to flush money into Super Pacs … They basically call the shots, and politicians can’t get anything through that they oppose.”Less than a month from election day, both Vance and Masters are trailing their Democratic opponents in the polls (Vance by less than Masters). But, Lessig says, it would be wrong to conclude Thiel – or any of the other mega-donors – are wasting their money.“If you’re a candidate and you know $10m is going to come in against you on a particular issue,” he said, “you are going to bend to avoid the effect of that money, whether or not it’s going to decide the race … If you’re someone who would otherwise be a strong climate activist, but you know that if you mention a carbon tax, a million dollars will drop from some anti-carbon tax Super Pac, you won’t talk about it.”Thiel’s bid to overthrow the system, in other words, goes well beyond his ability to determine which party controls the Senate next year. The money will solidify the notion that the country is being run by psychopaths, at least among a hard core of Republican voters, analysts warn, and will further harden the ideological battle lines that have split the country in two and made common ground ever harder to find. It also brings the extreme opinions of NatCon further into the mainstream, making it easier for radical Republican candidates to run and win in future races, they say.“We are at a crisis point here, not so much because the ideas are hard to defeat but we don’t have a context in which to defeat them,” Lessig said. “The fact that the same number of people believe the election was stolen as believed it on 6 January is a profound indictment of the information ecology in America.”The Brennan Center believes there are ways of improving the system, at least at the state and local level, and points to efforts in both red and blue states to close certain loopholes and introduce public financing models to rein in the influence of the mega-donors. Lee said she would also like to see federal legislation to build a meaningful firewall between campaign funds and Super Pacs.“The legislation exists,” she said, “and it would be a constitutional improvement even under [the] Citizens United [ruling]. All we need is the political will to act.”TopicsPeter ThielUS midterm elections 2022RepublicansDonald TrumpUS politicsUS political financinganalysisReuse this content More

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      Unchecked review: how Trump dodged two impeachments … and the January 6 committee?

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      Unchecked review: how Trump dodged two impeachments … and the January 6 committee? Rachael Bade and Karoun Demirjian’s account of how the Democrats failed to oust Trump is timely – and worryingOn Thursday, the House January 6 committee voted unanimously to issue a subpoena to Donald Trump. He has indicated he is considering testifying but surely the likelihood of him doing so under oath is nil. He lacks all incentive to appear. The committee’s long-term existence is doubtful.Trump a narcissist and a ‘dick’, ex-ambassador Sondland says in new bookRead moreIn their joint account of Trump’s two impeachments, Rachael Bade of Politico and Karoun Demirjian of the Washington Post suggest the US is exhausted by the pandemic and perpetual investigation. The quest for “Capitol riot accountability became an afterthought to … other crises”, they write.Trump lost to Joe Biden by more than 7m votes nationally but only by the thinnest of margins in the battleground states. Trump is on the ballot this November, even if his name does not appear. The Republicans are primed to take the House and possibly the Senate.In other words, Trump’s future rests with the courts and the electorate, not Congress. For all the committee’s efforts, Trump remains either hero or villain depending on demographics, habits and preferences. Political identification is an extension of self.Against this dystopian backdrop, Bade and Demirjian deliver a granular examination of both Trump impeachments and the work of the January 6 committee. Their joint effort is a stinging indictment of what they see as Republican cravenness and Democratic ineptitude.The former allowed Trump to evade consequences, the latter failed to master the levers of power. The authors are alarmed but their words are measured. They worry about what might be next.“Even if they did not intend to, the Democrats’ efforts to oust Trump created a paradigm for hostile presidents to ignore subpoenas and buck [Capitol] Hill oversight,” Bade and Demirjian write.They also posit that “a party with congressional supermajorities may one day oust a president with no evidence at all”. Said differently, the impeachment process will become wholly debased, a cudgel to be deployed as the US careens through its cold civil war. House Republicans have raised the possibility of a Biden impeachment already.As is to be expected, Unchecked is well-sourced and noted. The book records the give-and-take between congressional leaders and members, at the same time helping the reader understand how the US reached this point.During the first impeachment, the authors capture Mitch McConnell as he rallies his Republican Senate troops. His pitch centers on power. He depicts impeachment over Ukraine as a smokescreen for the Democrats’ ambition to take the chamber.“This is not about this president,” McConnell said. “It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing,” Rather, “it has always been about 3 November 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”McConnell loathed Trump but understood their fates could not be separated. If McConnell were pitted against Trump in a Republican popularity contest, the Kentuckian would be squashed. He lacked Trump’s appeal and was overtly linked to the donor base. Banker’s shirts do not signal “man of the people”. For McConnell, populism was an acquired taste, if that. He could fake it, to a point. But in the Senate, he held sway.At the same time, there was the reality of Trump’s approaches to Ukraine. As much as Trump lawyers argued there was no quid pro quo, in private, Senate Republicans weren’t buying it.Before the first impeachment trial, Ted Cruz of Texas met Trump’s team. He argued it was irrelevant whether their client engaged in a quid pro quo. Rather, the issue was one of intent. If uprooting foreign corruption motivated the contemplated transaction, that would be legally permissible. Cruz failed to persuade the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone. As the action shifted to the Senate, Trump’s lawyers angered Republican jurors. Alan Dershowitz equated presidential power to that of a king unchecked by parliament. “If the president does something which he believes will help get him elected, in the public interest”, that would be fine.Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of Republican leadership, was not amused. He demanded that Dershowitz be fired. The next day, the Harvard professor was gone.As for the Democrats, they failed to internalize that their audience was the Republican Senate. With Trump in the White House, Adam Schiff enjoyed a meteoric rise among Democratic House colleagues. But he left Senate Republicans unmoved. In the end, they were yawning.Fast forward to the second impeachment. Here, Bade and Demirjian depict Kevin McCarthy in all his oleaginous glory. The House minority leader devolves from someone who confronted Trump to an out-and-out sycophant.On January 6, McCarthy lambasted Trump over the riot. Within weeks, the man who would replace Nancy Pelosi as speaker traveled to Mar-a-Lago with hat in hand. He too realized that it was Trump’s party now.At its core, removing a president is about politics. For impeachment to succeed, it must transcend raw partisanship, a reality Pelosi expressed early on. Richard Nixon resigned because congressional allies would no longer protect him. The Watergate tapes were the smoking gun.Confidence Man: The Making of Trump and the Breaking of America review – the vain sadist and his ‘shrink’Read moreNow, with or without a criminal referral by the January 6 committee, justice department investigations of Trump are in full swing. On Friday, the Washington Post reported that a federal judge ordered Mike Pence to testify before a grand jury, and that earlier in the week the US Court of Appeals refused to block Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, from doing the same.But that is not the end of the story. Inflation continues, interest rates on home mortgages have shot above 7%, and Biden’s relationship to basic facts appears situational at best.With cost-of-living outstripping take-home pay, the saliency of abortion and the supreme court Dobbs decision diminishes. The Democrats also appear out of step on crime. In the midterms, shouting that democracy and the constitution hang in the balance will not be enough. Culture will always matter. Whether the Democrats can figure this out remains to be seen.
      Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump is published in the US by HarperCollins
      TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationTrump impeachment (2019)Trump impeachment (2021)US politicsUS Capitol attackreviewsReuse this content More