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    Revealed: Trump administration forced Joshua Tree to stay open during last US shutdown

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    By the time superintendent David Smith decided to close Joshua Tree national park on 7 January 2019, the list of problems was already long. Tire tracks wove through the wilderness mapping a path of destruction where rare plants had been crushed and trees toppled. Charred remains of illegal campfires dotted the desert, and historic cultural artifacts had been plundered. Trash piles were growing, vault toilets were overflowing and park security workers were being pushed to their limits.It was week three in what would become the longest shutdown of the US government, and the famed California park was feeling the consequences of operating without key staff, services and resources.To protect the park and its workers, it would have to close, Smith thought.But the Trump administration, which demanded national parks remain accessible throughout the shutdown, wasn’t willing to change course. In a controversial move, David Bernhardt, who had only recently been appointed acting secretary of the interior, called Smith and ordered him to keep the gates open.By the end of the 35-day shutdown, irreversible damage had been inflicted on Joshua Tree’s ecosystems, its wild, remote landscapes thrust into the political turmoil unfolding thousands of miles away.Bernhardt’s decision and its aftermath are chronicled in hundreds of pages of emails between park officials, which the Guardian obtained through a records request. The correspondence sheds light on the pressure national parks faced during the shutdown, as well as how political considerations influenced decisions about their maintenance and protection.Another possible government shutdown looms, raising fresh questions about whether the National Park Service (NPS), the federal agency that oversees the parks, will follow the precedent set by the previous administration.“The situation right now is deeply concerning on many levels, including the potential threat to resources and visitors,” said John Garder, the senior director of budget and appropriations at the National Parks Conservation Association, a non-profit that advocates for park preservation. “It is difficult for the parks service to do their jobs when Congress doesn’t give them the resources they need.”‘Parks are struggling’There have long been tensions over the interpretation of the NPS mission, with an uneasy balance of conservation and recreation. As politicians switch priorities, priorities in the parks can switch with them, and at the end of 2018 the NPS found itself in the crosshairs.On 21 December that year, Mick Mulvaney, who headed the office of management and budget for the Trump administration, announced the shutdown in a memorandum to agency leaders across the country, advising them that all talking points should reflect that the “national parks will remain as accessible as possible”. Communications staff for NPS’s Pacific west regional office followed up with instructions: “Keep the message positive, avoid saying limited access.”Regional NPS leaders meanwhile told superintendents in close-of-day emails they were aware of the potential for damage to delicate ecosystems and park infrastructure if parks stayed open without the necessary resources, and possible danger to largely unsupervised visitors. The timing of the shutdown, which left employees furloughed or working without pay during the busy holiday season, only added to the challenges, Sarah Creachbaum, the acting deputy regional director, wrote in an email on 23 December.“If the shutdown does persist for more than a few days it will be increasingly important to keep an eye out for signs and symptoms of stress among your teams,” she said. “Uncertainty and stress are legitimate health and safety issues that can affect everyone.”There would be weeks to go.As the shutdown progressed, and the situation at some national parks turned increasingly dire, the NPS leaders told park superintendents they would support decisions to shut parks down, especially in situations where staff and visitors could not be kept safe.“We’ve heard from many parks across the region that they are struggling more and more with trash accumulation, human waste, traffic congestion, fatigued employees etc,” wrote Stephanie Burkhart, the associate regional director of the Pacific west region on 28 December. “As the shutdown continues, these challenges will get harder. So please continue to evaluate your capacity and resources, rotate staff to provide rest and implement area closures as needed.”Two days later, Smith, the Joshua Tree superintendent, reached out to Creachbaum, Burkhart and communications staff to say he had decided to close campgrounds and a day-use area at the park after the start of the new year. The holidays were peak visiting times for the California site. With just nine working staff members, a disaster seemed imminent, he warned. Already, he reported, two search-and-rescue operations had been needed the week before, both requiring helicopters because the park hadn’t been able to adequately respond.Staff had told him that visitors were resisting direction, telling law enforcement rangers they could do whatever they wanted during the shutdown. Staff members were increasingly concerned about their own safety, especially as incidents of intoxication and physical assaults in the park began to rise.The interior department intervenesStaff who worked at Joshua Tree national park at the time said the experience was among the most difficult in their careers. “What I witnessed at the park was chaos and destruction,” said one park employee who, like others quoted in this story, asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution for speaking out.From the start of the shutdown, the majority of the park staff had been opposed to keeping Joshua Tree open, they said, describing long days of work and feeling despondent as some visitors abused their unfettered access.Another employee said decision-makers seemed out of touch with the reality on the ground: “In the lower rungs nothing made sense to us – you are just executing these orders that make no sense for the park, no sense for the visitor, and no sense for the employees.”National parks are required to be ready for events like a shutdown with a contingency plan. But the controversial directions from the Trump administration forced the agency and the parks to make in-the-moment adjustments.Four days before Smith informed NPS leaders of his intention to fully close Joshua Tree, the Pacific west regional NPS team were maintaining in staff emails that they would support park closures for heath and hygiene reasons, to protect visitor safety or due to staff fatigue. “As we come to the end of our second week of the closure, and with no end in sight, it is clear that keeping all park areas accessible is not feasible,” Creachbaum wrote to superintendents on 3 January. “Now is the time to determine if the NPS contingency plan triggers for closures apply to your circumstances.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut on 5 January, Bernhardt intervened, issuing a memorandum to the deputy director of the NPS instructing him to modify the contingency plan so parks would rely on Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act funds to stay open. FLREA funds, which come from park fees, are designated by law to be used to improve the parks, including hacking away at a large maintenance backlog, estimated at roughly $12bn across all parks at the time.Bernhardt ordered that they be used for maintaining operations “until such funds have reached zero balance”.The Government Accountability Office would later deem Bernhardt’s move to be a violation of the law. In a scathing report issued in 2019, the GAO concluded that Bernhardt’s decree had undermined congressional power of the purse and sidestepped laws outlining shutdown procedures. The interior department maintains Bernhardt’s decision was legal, and in 2020 the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) laid out a legal argument supporting Bernhardt and his decision.“The decision to utilize FLREA funds in 2019 was entirely lawful,” Cole Rojewski, a lawyer speaking on behalf of Bernhardt, said, pointing to the OMB analysis. He added that if the action had been initiated from the beginning of the shutdown, the destruction of the park and dangers posed to both staff and visitors could have been avoided “while also allowing for continued public access and ensuring dedicated employees were paid throughout the duration of the shutdown”.Raúl Grijalva, a congressman from Arizona, disagreed. As chair of the committee on natural resources in 2019, he wrote to Bernhardt admonishing him for the decision to use FLREA funds and questioned whether he had complied with the law outlining their use. Casting the former secretary’s act as a way to help “obfuscate the real costs of the shutdown”, Grijalva said the Department of the Interior’s actions “sidestepped Congress and used these park funds for political purposes”.A call from the Trump administrationBy 6 January, superintendents across the system were rushing to carve out new plans to bring back furloughed staff using FLREA funds. Smith, meanwhile, still tried to quickly close Joshua Tree. On 7 January he requested a temporary closure from regional park leaders, highlighting the “considerable damage to park resources”. Creachbaum, the deputy regional director, responded: “I am so sorry about the damage to your park. It’s heartbreaking. We support the closure.” It would be her last email serving in the leadership role, and she stepped down soon after. A press release was drafted from Joshua Tree national park announcing a plan to close.But the very next day, Smith wrote to Creachbaum’s successor, Katariina Tuovinen, alerting her that he’d been contacted by the director of the NPS, who had advised him Bernhardt would call him later that day. “The Secretary will be calling to order that the park stays open and that we use FLREA funds to do it,” Smith wrote in an email on 8 January.Communications officials at the national office scrambled to reframe the eyebrow-raising shift, issuing a new press release that cast the decision more favorably. “National Park Service officials have been able to avert a temporary closure of Joshua Tree National Park,” the release read, highlighting how revenue generated by recreation fees would be used to support the reopened campgrounds and entrance stations.At the time, the NPS didn’t return calls and emails from the Guardian requesting comment on how this decision had been made. (The emails show they did connect with some reporters, asking the Los Angeles Times to make revisions to their reporting.)A cautionary tale – or a precedent?Amid a growing likelihood the US government is headed for another shutdown on 1 October, it’s unclear how the NPS is planning to respond.In August, agencies across the federal government were expected to submit contingency plans. But the NPS has yet to confirm whether a new plan has been drafted and whether national parks will again be expected to remain accessible during the funding stalemate.Repeated requests for information and comment went unanswered from both the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service.The park service operating budget is also under threat from budget cuts. As record numbers of visitors continue to flood in, the depletion of funds for maintenance and improvement could lead to more disastrous results, Garder argued. The maintenance backlog has only ballooned in recent years, growing from $11.6bn during the last shutdown to more than $22bn in 2022.Jonathan Jarvis, a retired NPS director who served under the Obama administration and oversaw a 2013 shutdown, agrees. “When I was director, there was no question – you shut ’em down,” he said.Jarvis, who spent four decades in the park service, said he hopes for a future where public lands aren’t put at risk by shifts in political whim, and advocates for the agency to be removed from the Department of the Interior.Ultimately, he said, the future of US national parks will be linked to funding. “The good news is that in the US the parks are highly supported by the American people,” he said. “But they expect them to be taken care of.” More

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      Cassidy Hutchinson left DC amid ‘security concerns’ after January 6 hearings

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      The former Donald Trump White House aide who became a pivotal January 6 witness remembers wanting to make a last-minute run for it before delivering her crucial testimony about the US Capitol attack that the defeated president’s supporters staged.But Cassidy Hutchinson kept her nerve, and the cost of breaking ranks with Trump and his fanatical supporters was steep.“Security protocols and … concerns” forced her out of her Washington DC apartment and into hiding after testifying, she said in an interview airing Sunday at 9am ET.“My life changed – the way that I was living my life – for a while,” Hutchinson told CBS News Sunday Morning. “I could not go back to my apartment. I ended up moving down to Atlanta for several months.”Hutchinson, who was working forMark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, when January 6 occurred, also told CBS that she continues to consider herself a Republican. But she said she is not supporting Trump’s efforts to win the Republican nomination and return to the Oval Office in 2024 as he grapples with more than 90 criminal charges, many stemming from his attempts to overturn his electoral loss to Joe Biden weeks before the Capitol attack.“I would … like to make clear – I would not back the former president of the United States,” Hutchinson remarked to CBS News Sunday Morning’s Tracy Smith during the interview. “He is dangerous for the country. He is willing – and has showed time and time again willingness – to proliferate lies, and to vulnerable American people, so he could stay in power.“To me, that is the most un-American thing that you can do.”Hutchinson gave some of the most dramatic testimony about the Capitol attack during live congressional hearings in the summer of 2022. One key moment she described was how Trump accosted a secret service agent and lunged for the steering wheel of the car the then-president was in when he was told he would not be driven to the Capitol.The Capitol attack carried out by supporters whom Trump had told to “fight like hell” was a desperate but failed maneuver meant to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s victory over him. The riot has been linked to nine deaths – more than 1,100 people have been charged in connection with the attack, and the majority of them have either pleaded guilty or been convicted by judges or juries.Hutchinson explained Sunday how it was a grueling decision to testify at the January 6 hearings conducted by a special House committee.“I almost ran out of – there’s a little hold room outside the Committee room – that we were about to walk in, and I almost darted,” Hutchinson told the program. “I heard the door click open, and I turned around and I looked at my attorney and said, ‘I can’t do this.’ And I started to walk, and he gently pushed my shoulders. And he said, ‘You can do this.’ And then we walked out.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHutchinson’s interview was meant to promote her memoir Enough, which was published by CBS’s sister company Simon & Schuster and is scheduled for release Tuesday.Enough has already attracted worldwide headlines after the Guardian reported that in it Hutchinson wrote about how she was groped by Rudy Giuliani – the Trump lawyer and former New York City mayor – on the day of the Capitol attack. The book mainly tracks the 27-year-old’s journey from Trump believer to disenchantment with him, echoing some of the comments Hutchinson made to CBS in Sunday’s interview.Giuliani and Trump have pleaded not guilty to charges that they illegally sought to overturn Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory in the state of Georgia. The pair are among 19 people charged in the case brought against state prosecutors based out of Atlanta.Those charges are contained in one of four criminal indictments filed against Trump this year. The others charge him for his retention of classified documents after leaving the White House, hush-money payments to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels and other efforts to nullify his 2020 defeat that culminated in the January 6 attack.Trump has denied all wrongdoing and enjoys commanding polling leads over other candidates pursuing the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. More

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      Former aide says Trump wrote to-do lists on classified documents – report

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      Donald Trump has denied wrongdoing after a report on Monday said that one of the former president’s long-time assistants told federal investigators he repeatedly wrote to-do lists for her on documents from the White House marked classified.The aide, Molly Michael, told investigators that more than once she got requests or tasks from Trump written on the back of notecards that she later recognized as sensitive White House materials, ABC News reported on Monday, citing sources.The notecards had visible classification markings used to brief Trump while he was still in office about phone calls with foreign leaders or other international matters, the news outlet said.Michael became Trump’s executive assistant in the White House in 2018 and continued to work for him when he left office. She resigned last year, in the wake of Trump’s alleged refusal to comply with federal requests, ABC News said.A Trump spokesperson dismissed the report as “illegal leaks” and denied wrongdoing.Trump, currently the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has been charged along with two aides with illegally storing troves of classified documents at his personal residence and lying to federal investigators who sought to retrieve them.Trump was charged in an indictment in June with criminal counts, including violations of the Espionage Act, conspiracy to obstruct justice and making false statements to investigators. He has pleaded not guilty.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump is also under separate indictments in Washington DC, and Georgia over his alleged efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss to US president Joe Biden and in New York over a hush money payment he paid to a porn star. He denies wrongdoing. More

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      US special counsel seeks gag order on Trump’s ‘inflammatory’ statements

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      The US special counsel prosecuting Donald Trump for election subversion has asked a judge to impose “limited restrictions” on the former president’s public statements, citing his frequent “inflammatory attacks” on the court, prospective witnesses and citizens of Washington DC.In a filing on Friday, federal prosecutors requested that judge Tanya Chutkan issue a “narrow” gag order that would prohibit Trump from making statements “regarding the identity, testimony, or credibility of prospective witnesses” and “about any party, witness, attorney, court personnel, or potential jurors that are disparaging and inflammatory, or intimidating”.The request noted his “near-daily” disparaging posts on social media site Truth Social, including his post after his arraignment that said, “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU”; claims that the justice system is “rigged” against him; attacks on DC as a “filthy and crime ridden” district where he says he will not get a fair trial and direct attacks on Chutkan, including calling her “a fraud dressed up as a judge” and “radical Obama hack”.The filing from Jack Smith, the special counsel, who has himself been disparaged by Trump as “deranged” and someone with “unchecked and insane aggression”, said that prosecutors were seeking a “well-defined restriction that is targeted at extrajudicial statements that present a serious and substantial danger of materially prejudicing this case”.Prosecutors noted that his attacks on social media have previously endangered the subjects of his vitriol, sometimes leading to violence: “The defendant knows that when he publicly attacks individuals and institutions, he inspires others to perpetrate threats and harassment against his targets.”Chutkan has previously warned Trump’s legal team about his statements. Last month, she told his lawyer: “I caution you and your client to take special care in your public statements about this case. I will take whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of these proceedings.”The gag order request came the same day that unsealed filings revealed that Twitter, now known as X, gave prosecutors at least 32 of Trump’s private messages.Repeated violations of gag orders in criminal matters can lead to jail time for defendants. The judge has set a March 2024 date for the trial on charges of conspiracy to defraud the US, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn his separate criminal case in Georgia, Trump was released on the condition that he not intimidate co-defendants, witnesses and others. More

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      US judge rejects Mark Meadows’ request to move Georgia case to federal court

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      A federal judge denied a request from former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to transfer his Georgia 2020 election interference case from state to federal court on the basis that some of the charged conduct was within the scope of his official duties.The ruling from US district judge Steve Jones on Friday means the prosecution of Meadows brought by the Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis stays in superior court in Atlanta, unless Meadows appeals and the decision is reversed by the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit.“The Court finds insufficient evidence to establish that the gravamen, or a heavy majority of overt acts alleged against Meadows relate to his role as White House Chief of Staff,” the judge wrote in an unusually detailed and extensive 49-page decision.“Even if Meadows took on tasks that mirror the duties that he carried out when acting in his official role,” the judge wrote, “he has failed to demonstrate how the election-related activities that serve as the basis for the charges in the indictment are related to any of his official acts.”Last month, the Atlanta-area grand jury handed up a sprawling 41-count indictment against Donald Trump and 18 others, including Meadows, alleging that they violated Georgia’s state Rico statute in their efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election.Meadows had sought to remove the case to federal court arguing that the sprawling racketeering charges related to his normal work undertaken as a White House chief of staff, which gave him immunity from prosecution and prevented him from being prosecuted at the state level.But the judge rejected his arguments in a detailed 49-page decision, determining that Meadows did not meet his burden to show that he was acting within his job description when he undertook efforts to benefit Trump as a political candidate rather than Trump as president.“The color of the Office of the White House Chief of Staff did not include working with or working for the Trump campaign,” the judge wrote, “except for simply coordinating the President’s schedule, traveling with the President to his campaign events, and redirecting communications to the campaign.The rationale to seek removal to federal court is seen as twofold: the jury pool would expand beyond just the Atlanta area – which skews heavily Democratic – and a federal judge might be less deferential to local prosecutors compared with judges in the Fulton county superior court.Trump has weighed for weeks whether to file a similar removal motion, and the Guardian has previously reported that the Trump legal team was watching to see how Meadows fared before deciding whether to make a request before their statutory deadline at the end of September.Meadows’s defeat compounds his legal difficulties in Fulton county because his value as a cooperating witness has now diminished, legal experts said. The ruling is also ominous for Trump, who is seen as having a weaker case for removal compared to his former chief of staff.A spokesperson for Trump declined to comment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBroadly speaking, Jones determined that Meadows could not have undertaken any political actions as part of his official duties because the US constitution does not provide any basis for the executive branch to involve itself in state election and post-election procedures.To determine Meadows’s scope, the judge used the Hatch Act, which plainly prohibits executive branch officials like Meadows from using their official authority to influence or interfere with the results of an election through partisan political activity.The indictment described Meadows as having participated in several so-called overt acts in furtherance of the racket and Meadows had argued that even if one of those acts fell under the scope of his chief of staff role, the case should be transferred to federal court.But the judge interpreted the removal statute differently and he decided that Meadows having a single overt act come under his duties was not enough for the federal court to assume jurisdiction.The more important question was what activities were at the “heart” of Meadows’s participation in the racket and whether those activities as a whole related to the scope of his federal office, the judge wrote, before concluding that they were not.And even if the remaining overt acts were characterized as everyday chief of staff duties like making phone calls or preparing meetings for the purpose of advising the president, the underlying substance of the actions were political in nature and therefore outside his official duties, the judge wrote. More

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      Ex-Trump aide Peter Navarro faces trial on contempt of Congress charges

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      Federal prosecutors are expected to present the case on Wednesday that former Trump White House official Peter Navarro should be convicted of contempt of Congress because he wilfully ignored a subpoena issued last year by the House January 6 committee during the investigation into the Capitol attack.The only standard that prosecutors will have to reach is that Navarro’s failure to comply with the subpoena was deliberate and intentional – and Navarro will not be able to argue in defense that he blew off the subpoena because he thought Donald Trump had asserted executive privilege.Navarro is about to face his contempt of Congress trial without what he had hoped would be his strongest defense, after the presiding US district court judge Amit Mehta ruled last week Navarro had failed to prove Trump had actually asserted executive privilege to block his cooperation.In an added twist, prosecutors also said the day before trial that they intend to argue that Navarro’s claim of executive privilege was actually self-incriminating because it reinforced his failure to comply with the subpoena was calculated and deliberate, according to court documents.That sets the stage for a trial in federal court in Washington which could end in a quick defeat for Navarro given his lack of defenses, though the consequential nature of the case could also mean it immediately becomes tied up for months on appeal.Navarro was indicted last June on two counts of criminal contempt of Congress after he was referred to the justice department for prosecution for defying the January 6 committee’s subpoena demanding documents and testimony about the former president’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election results.The former Trump adviser has long insisted he could not comply with the subpoena because Trump had asserted executive privilege and he was obliged to protect his confidential discussions with Trump when he was the president.But Navarro has faced a reckoning in the months since, unable to produce any direct evidence from Trump or Trump’s lawyers supporting his claims, and the judge found in recent hearings that even Navarro’s most compelling pieces of evidence lacked substance.The lack of actual evidence for the executive privilege assertion – even though Navarro swore to it under oath – was cited repeatedly by the judge when he ultimately decided that Navarro could not raise the executive privilege issue at all as a defense at trial.“There was no formal invocation of executive privilege by [Trump] after personal consideration nor authorization to Mr Navarro to invoke privilege on his behalf,” Mehta said, adding Navarro had not met his burden to show a valid assertion.The standard for a valid executive privilege assertion is three-fold, Mehta ultimately ruled: it must be made by the president or an authorized representative, it must be made after personal consideration, and it must be specific to the subpoena in question.One letter addressed to Navarro after his indictment from the Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran saying Navarro had an obligation to protect executive privilege was unsatisfactory because it notably did not say Navarro was authorized to invoke on Trump’s behalf, the judge found.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnd a second letter addressed to Navarro informing him that Trump had asserted executive privilege over a different subpoena issued by the House select committee investigating the Trump administration’s Covid response was not applicable to the January 6 committee subpoena, the judge found.Still, even if Navarro had been able to prove a privilege assertion, it was unclear whether he would have been in a different position. Mehta noted, for instance, that Navarro would have still needed to testify about non-privileged topics and produce a log of documents he was withholding.Last February, Navarro was subpoenaed by the January 6 committee after he played an outsized role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and was briefed on a plan to obstruct the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election win dubbed the “Green Bay Sweep”.After he skipped his deposition, the committee moved to hold him in contempt before the full House of Representatives voted to refer him to the justice department for criminal prosecution.Navarro became the second person indicted for his subpoena defiance after former Trump strategist Steve Bannon also ignored his January 6 committee subpoena. Bannon was convicted last year and sentenced to four months in federal prison and $6,500 in fines, but remains free pending appeal. More

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      Mark Meadows pleads not guilty in Georgia 2020 election indictment

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      Mark Meadows, the former Trump White House chief of staff, has pleaded not guilty to charges accusing him of participating in an illegal scheme to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia and will not appear in court in Atlanta this week.Scott McAfee, the Fulton county superior court judge, had scheduled arraignment hearings for Wednesday for Meadows, Donald Trump and the other 17 people charged last month in a sprawling indictment. By midday Tuesday, all of the defendants had filed paperwork pleading not guilty in filings with the court and waived their rights to an arraignment hearing.During an arraignment hearing, defendants have the right to have the charges against them read and to enter a formal plea. Trump pleaded not guilty in a court filing Thursday and Rudy Giuliani entered his plea Friday, with the rest of the pleas trickling in over several days.While all of the defendants had filed the paperwork by Tuesday, some of them did not file 48 hours ahead of the scheduled arraignments as required by the judge. And, while the judge requires the waiver to be “personally signed by the defendant”, a lawyer for Misty Hampton, a former elections director in Coffee county, filed the waiver without getting Hampton to sign it herself. It was not immediately clear whether the judge would reject any of the waivers as a result.Meadows and four others are seeking to move the charges against them to federal court. But during a hearing last week called on Meadows’ request, US district judge Steve Jones made clear that if he had not ruled by the arraignment date or if the case was not moved to federal court, Meadows would not be excused from arraignment.Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, former Trump lawyers, each have filed demands for a speedy trial, meaning their trials would have to start by early November, and have asked to be tried alone. The judge scheduled a hearing on Wednesday about their motions to sever themselves from the others.After Chesebro filed his speedy trial demand, Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, asked McAfee to set a 23 October trial date for all defendants. The judge set a trial to begin that date for Chesebro alone.Trump’s lawyer has filed a motion asking that he be tried separately from any defendant who asks for a speedy trial.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDuring Wednesday’s hearing, McAfee wrote that he intends to ask prosecutors how long they expect it will take to present their case against all 19 defendants together or for any groupings of defendants, including the number of witnesses they plan to call and the number and size of exhibits they will likely introduce. More

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      Trump claims he did nothing wrong after surrender in Georgia election case – video

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      Donald Trump claimed his arrest amounted to ‘election interference’ and argued he had ‘every right’ to contest Joe Biden’s victory after reporting to the Fulton county jail in Atlanta, Georgia, where he was formally arrested after his indictment on charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election result in the state. The former US president, photographed for a police mugshot, had reached an agreement to post a bond guaranteeing his release as his case moves through the court system More

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      Losing Our Religion review: Trump and the crisis of US Christianity

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      Christianity and the “powers that be” have weathered two millennia, their relationship varying by time and place. Pontius Pilate condemned Jesus to the cross. Emperor Constantine converted. Henry VIII broke from Rome and founded the Church of England. In the US, the denominational divides of protestantism helped drive the revolution and provided fuel for the civil war.In his new book, the Rev Russell Moore opens a chapter, “Losing Our Authority: How the Truth Can Save”, with the words “Jesus Saves”, followed by a new historical tableau: January 6 and the threat Donald Trump and the mob posed to democracy and Mike Pence.“That the two messages, a gallows and ‘Jesus Saves’ could coexist is a sign of crisis for American Christianity,” Moore writes.Heading toward the Iowa caucus, Trump runs six points better among white evangelicals than overall. As for the devout Pence, a plurality of white evangelicals view him unfavorably.Moore is mindful of history, and the roles Christianity has played: “Parts of the church were wrong – satanically wrong – on issues of righteousness and justice, such as the Spanish Inquisition and the scourge of human slavery.” He is editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, a publication founded by Billy Graham. Losing Our Religion offers a mixture of lament and hope. In places, its sadness is tinged with anger. In the south, the expression “losing my religion”, popularized by REM in a 1991 song, “conveys the moment when ‘politeness gives way to anger’,” Moore explains.Moore’s public and persistent opposition to the election of Trump set him apart from most white evangelicals and would lead to his departure from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).“The man on the throne in heaven is a dark-skinned, Aramaic-speaking ‘foreigner’, who is probably not all that impressed by chants of “Make America great again,” Moore wrote in spring 2016. “Regardless of the outcome in November, [Trump’s] campaign is forcing American Christians to grapple with some scary realities that will have implications for years to come.”He was prescient. Graham’s son, Franklin, threatened Americans with God’s wrath if they had the temerity to criticize Trump. At the time, Moore was president of the SBC ethics and religious liberty commission. His politics forced him to choose. He opted for Christ and his convictions. He joined a nondenominational church.His new book is subtitled “An Altar Call for Evangelical America” but it aims for a broader audience. It contains ample references to Scripture, but also to the journalist Tim Alberta, Jonathan Haidt of New York University, Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, and Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute, a liberal group.Of white evangelicals, Moore quotes Jones: “Their greatest temptation will be to wield what remaining political power they have as desperate corrective for their waning cultural influence.” Welcome to the culture wars, and to what Ron Brownstein of the Atlantic has called the coalition of restoration.Against the backdrop of rising Christian nationalism and January 6, Moore reads the writing on the wall. He is troubled by the shrinking gap between Christian nationalism and neo-paganism. “The step before replacing Jesus with Thor is to turn Jesus into Thor,” he observes. Moore found the presence of prayers in “‘Jesus’s name’ right next to a horn-wearing pagan shaman in the well of the evacuated United States Senate” disturbing, but not coincidental.The Magasphere and Twitterverse bolster Moore’s conclusions.“President Trump will be arrested during Lent – a time of suffering and purification for the followers of Jesus Christ,” Joseph McBride, a rightwing lawyer who represents several insurrectionists, tweeted last March. “As Christ was crucified, and then rose again on the third day, so too will Donald Trump.”Caesar as deity. We’ve seen that movie before. McBride, however, did not stop there.Hours later, he tweeted: “JESUS LOVES DONALD TRUMP. JESUS DIED FOR DONALD TRUMP. JESUS LIVES INSIDE DONALD TRUMP. DEAL WITH IT.”Three-in-10 adults in the US, meanwhile, are categorized as religious “nones”. Only 40% of Americans call themselves Protestant. The Wasp ascendancy has yielded to Sunday brunch and walks in the woods. “The Father, Son and Holy Ghost, they took the last train for the coast,” as Don MacLean sang. For some, Trump rallies present a variation of community and communion. A younger generation of evangelicals heads for the door. The numbers tell of a crisis of faith.“We see now young evangelicals walking away from evangelism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the “church itself” does not believe what the church teaches,” Moore laments.Predation, lust and greed are poor calling cards for religion. Unchecked abuse within the Catholic church left deep and lasting scars among those who needed God’s love most. Moore notes the Catholic church’s fall from grace in Ireland and posits that “born-again America” may be experiencing a similar backlash, as a powerful cultural institution lacking “credibility” seeks to “enforce its orthodoxies”.Against this backdrop, Catholicism’s boomlet among younger continental Europeans is noteworthy. Recently, hundreds of thousands converged on Lisbon to hear the Pope. The same demographic helps fuel the resurgence of the Spanish far right. Tethering the cross to the flag retains its appeal.That said, Jerry Falwell Jr’s posturing as Trump-booster and voyeur didn’t exactly jibe with Scripture. The ousted head of Liberty University, son of the founder of the Moral Majority, allegedly paid a pool boy to have sex with his wife as he watched.“What we are seeing now … is in many cases the shucking off of any pretense of hypocrisy for the outright embrace of immorality,” Moore writes.America barrels toward a Biden v Trump rematch. The former president is a professional defendant. The country and its religion sag and shudder. Moore prays for revival, even as he fears nostalgia.
      Losing Our Religion is published in the US by Penguin Random House More