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      Free meals v hungry children: is this the school lunch election? | Marcus Weaver-Hightower

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      The humble school meal is having a moment. With the nomination of Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, as Kamala Harris’s running mate, many voters and pundits are suddenly talking about school meals. And that’s good, because the stakes are high for the national school lunch and school breakfast programs since the campaigns and their parties have very different records and plans.Since Walz became the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, an image of him has frequently circulated. In the photograph, he’s surrounded by smiling children hugging him after he signed a 2023 bill making school meals universally free for all Minnesota children. His was the fourth state to commit to feeding all children at school; now nine states have done so, and more are considering similar measures. No more forms to fill out to prove your income, which busy parents can forget or that get crumpled in a backpack. No more penalizing children when their parents fall behind on lunch accounts. Every kid gets fed, powering them up for their day’s work learning and growing.By most measures, the Minnesota program has been successful and popular. Participation in the meals program soared, increasing 15% at lunch and 37% at breakfast compared with the previous year. Due to those increases, the economies of scale improved, and some districts have been able to invest more in scratch cooking with ingredients from local farmers. It turns out that relieving cafeteria staff of the duty to go after parents who fall behind on lunch payments leaves them more time to focus on food quality.Minnesota’s registered voters are overwhelmingly happy with the program, too. A KSTP/SurveyUSA poll showed that 72% agreed with the legislation, including 90% of liberals and 57% of conservatives. Even 59% of Trump voters in 2020 agreed. In online forums, Minnesota commenters tend to be remarkably supportive of feeding all children, even if they don’t have any themselves or if they think the food could be better. Parents rave about the convenience and savings.Minnesota’s success isn’t an outlier, but a consistent feature of free meals for all. A 2022 study of the national Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which provides universally free meals nationwide in districts that have a poverty rate of 25% or more, found that more kids eat when the meal is free. That’s true even among kids who were already eligible for free or reduced-price meals, suggesting that stigma is keeping many from accepting assistance. Even more helpful, families with children in schools that provide meals tend to spend less at the grocery store while still improving the quality of their diets. And, perhaps most important, research consistently shows that school meals improve students’ academic performance, behavior and health outcomes.It’s not assured that a Harris-Walz administration would push such legislation nationally. Harris has mentioned school meal programs at least twice, once in a 2017 Facebook post deploring lunch shaming and recently on X, when she touted Walz’s school lunch program as a sign of support for the middle class. But if the Democratic ticket does put the issue on its platform or list of priorities, school meals would at least have a knowledgable champion in Walz. He has seen it work on the ground, and he knows the benefits that it brings to the vast majority of families with children in his state.Meanwhile, Minnesota Republican lawmakers have criticized the free meals program. State representative Kristin Robbins’s complaint is typical: “All the low-income students who need – and we want to provide, make sure no one goes hungry – they were getting [meals] through the free and reduced lunch program. This [new legislation] gave free lunch to all the wealthy families … Is that really a priority?” Walz’s reply to this argument dripped with irony: “Isn’t that rich? Our Republican colleagues were concerned this would be a tax cut for the wealthiest.” The year before, the Minnesota GOP proposed a $3.5bn tax cut that largely would have benefited the wealthiest 20%. Feeding all the state’s schoolchildren, even after going over budget because it was so popular, costs only about one-seventh of that.Republicans at the national level, too, disdain expanding access to free meals and improving nutrition standards. In March, the Republican Study Committee, a caucus to which roughly three-quarters of all Republican House members belong, released its 2025 budget proposal. It called for ending the CEP for high-poverty districts. Doing so would snatch school meals from millions of children currently receiving them, shifting that cost back to their families. It would also probably increase the bureaucracy for schools, though Republicans claim that this administrative system is rife with “fraud and abuse”. While there have been high-profile cases of fraud in the school meals programs (for instance, a Chicago area nutrition director was recently convicted of stealing $1.5m, largely in chicken wings), most identified “abuse” entails clerical errors like giving wrongly categorized meals (free or reduced-price) to kids very near the income cutoffs or ringing up a meal without one of the required components on the tray, like enough vegetables. I would also point out that, if all children got the meals free, there would be no “fraud” in giving a hungry child a school meal, and we could save the labor and cost of all that paperwork.Reducing access to free school meals is also a priority of the now-infamous Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the next administration. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but his ties to it are indisputable and a second Trump White House would probably be well populated with its adherents.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRegarding school meals, Project 2025 repeats the willful deception that the federal lunch and breakfast programs are “specifically for children in poverty”. In truth, from their beginnings, these programs were meant for all children. But they always made allowances for impoverished children’s access – not only poor children, but inclusive of poor children. The authors of Project 2025 argue that any expansion of free meals is against the “original intent” and creates “an entitlement for students from middle- and upper-income homes”. (I wonder what they think of all those wealthy children getting free textbooks?) Their stated policy goals are to “work with lawmakers to eliminate CEP” and to “reject efforts to create universal free school meals”.While Trump himself may know little about school meals policy (I have never found an instance of him directly talking about it), his first administration set out immediately to relax nutrition standards set under President Obama. The very first policy announcement from Sonny Perdue, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, was that his department would seek to bring back higher-fat chocolate milk, reduce whole grain requirements and stop sodium reductions. And despite the US Department of Agriculture’s own research findings that Obama-era rules had made school meals significantly healthier and debunking claims that plate waste was increasing, one of the last acts of the Trump USDA was to propose a further weakening of nutrition standards to require fewer fruits and allow yet more usually high-salt items such as pizza and hash browns. But the clock ran out on that proposal, and the Biden-Harris administration then increased school meals’ nutrition standards.Given the Republicans’ legislative goals and the direction of one of the GOP’s leading thinktanks, a second Trump administration would almost surely unravel access to school meals and gut hard-won, incremental gains that have made them healthier. All this despite nationwide polls that indicate a majority of US voters agree that all kids should get universally free school meals. More

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      All in the Family by Fred Trump review – when dollars are thicker than blood

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      Forget about the sanctity of the human family or its sticky glue of love. If you’re a Trump, the institution is a convenient mechanism for ensuring inheritance, whether of gilded financial assets or brazen moral defects. Trumps are branded merchandise, and their dynastic DNA is a double helix of greed, graft and feuding malice.Since numbers on ledgers are what matter to this mercenary dynasty, they advance arithmetically. In All in the Family, the last in a series of Fred Trumps identifies his great-grandfather – who absconded from Germany to avoid military service and founded a property empire by establishing a chain of brothels in Canada – as Fred Zero. His son Fred I, a rack-renting landlord in the New York suburbs, then begat Fred II, who defied the family by preferring a career as an airline pilot; then, after being reduced to a “second-tier Trump”, he drank himself to an early death, which made his younger brother Donald the heir apparent. Fred III, the author of this memoir, aspires to be “a different kind of Trump” but coyly trades on his tainted surname, describing himself on LinkedIn as “a third-generation member of a prominent New York real estate family”.Trumpism consists, as Fred III puts it, of “name promotion”. Fred I advertised the homes he built by anchoring a yacht emblazoned with Trump signs off Coney Island on summer weekends. The logo has since been affixed to hotels, golf clubs, a failed airline, a dodgy university and several bankrupt casinos; it currently sells Bibles, high-top sneakers that yell “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” and a Victory cologne that purports to waft out the intimate essence of Donald.What Fred III calls the “T-word” – almost as odious as the forbidden N-word, which he remembers Donald using when enraged by vandals who damaged his car – undergoes some slick mutations in the course of this chronicle. Fred Zero was born Friedrich Drumpf, which sounds like a belch or sneeze. Anglicised, the surname evokes trump cards and trumped-up accusations, a better match for the family’s ruthlessly competitive creed. Fred I’s middle name was Christ, rhyming with mist, which he derived from his German mother. But he worried that this might repel the Jewish tenants in his New York apartment blocks, so he dropped the “h” and called himself Crist instead. Fred III adopted the new spelling when he bizarrely christened his first son Cristopher; there would be no Fred IV, he decided, because “it was time to stop counting”.The other Trumps remained at their adding machines, policing the succession. Donald’s sister, Maryanne – a judge who retired from the bench after a charge of misconduct, foiling his whimsical scheme to appoint her to the supreme court – complained because Fred III jumped the queue by producing Cristopher: according to her dotty theory of primogeniture, her own son, Fred I’s oldest grandchild, had the right to marry and procreate first. Then when Donald’s creditors threatened to foreclose on his debts during the 1990s, Maryanne and the other siblings produced a will altered by the already senile Fred I that disinherited Fred II’s offspring and cruelly cut off the medical insurance for Fred III’s severely disabled son William.View image in fullscreenFred III and his sister, Mary, sued to claw back a portion of the spoils to which they felt entitled. Mary, a trained psychologist, additionally declared war on the family in her book Too Much and Never Enough, published as a spoiler during Donald’s re-election campaign in 2020; in it, incensed by his mismanagement of the pandemic, she accuses him of “mass murder”. Her brother’s charges against their uncle are milder. Anxious to maintain a semblance of peace, Fred III reminiscences fondly about his access to the Oval Office and takes pride in his complimentary membership of a Trump golf club. The family’s handed-down anecdotes about Donald’s bratty behaviour amount, as Fred III sees it, to little more than “stupid kid stuff”: hyper-aggressive and liable to tantrums, he delighted in “the pain he hoped he had caused” by stealing toys from other children or hurling an eraser at a teacher he disliked. That might sound trivial, but these infantile urges still activate the old man who itches to regain power and they will be converted into vengeful authoritarian policies if he is re-elected.Despite a settlement, the financial dispute with the aunts and uncles continues to rankle. For the Trumps, Fred III realises: “Blood only went so far – as far as the dollar signs.” Arguing about his grandfather’s will, he defends the protocols of “multigenerational wealth”, but that very terminology splices together genetic and economic heritage. As he ought to know, families pass on congenital failings as well as stocks and shares. His father once told him that he had “inherited a bad gene” and warned him to be careful about drinking; Fred III admits to having had his own foreordained struggle with alcoholism.Donald, like Hitler, trusts in eugenics. At a recent rally in Minnesota, he promoted himself as a pure-bred product of “the racehorse theory”, and he fancies that his genes make him “a very stable genius”. His apostles agree. He recovered from Covid, according to the self-styled Maga life coach Brenden Dilley, because “he’s got God-tier genetics, top fucking one percentile genetics, right?” This insane conceit explains Donald’s spasm of disgust when Fred III tells him that William’s affliction is “some kind of genetic thing”. “Not in our family,” Donald replies with a snort, “there’s nothing wrong with our genes!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe most lethal moment in the book occurs when Donald helpfully suggests that Fred III, rather than spending money on William’s care, should “just let him die and move down to Florida”. The advice comes from a remote-control executioner: after the death of the Iraqi terrorist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Fred III listens to Donald exultantly telling the king of Jordan on the phone: “I killed him, I killed him like a dog.” What shocks me most, reading the exchange about William, is the casual logic of the follow-up. Why Florida? It’s Donald’s home, now that he is such a pariah in New York, and he commends it to his nephew as a moral Bermuda Triangle, a swamp for human alligators.Fred III makes a final attempt to redeem his tarnished lineage by citing “something that William inherited from our family”. No, this is not a trust fund; it is the young man’s “heart-melting blue eyes”, his only means of communicating with the world. It’s a nice try, but a harsher truth is proclaimed by the book’s epigraph from The Godfather, which quotes Michael, soon to be installed as mob boss, when he shrugs that the gangsterism of the Corleones is “not personal, it’s strictly business”. Donald, who customarily deflects condemnation by projecting it on to others, used to rant about “the Biden crime family”; indirectly exposing the self-disgust that skulks behind his self-love, he was of course describing the vicious, venal conduct of his own clan. More

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      Washington insiders simulated a second Trump presidency. Can a role-play save democracy?

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      It is the afternoon of 20 January 2025 and Donald Trump is in his White House dining room, glued to the same TV where he sat transfixed as the January 6 attack on the US Capitol unfolded four years ago. This morning, he completed one of the most spectacular political comebacks in US history, reciting the oath of office at the inauguration ceremony that returned him to the most powerful job on Earth.His political resurrection has caused turmoil in the transition period, and massive anti-Trump demonstrations have erupted in several big cities. In his inaugural address, the 47th president makes clear his intention to deal with his detractors: “They are rioting in the streets. We are not safe. Make our cities safe again!” he commands.The peaceful marches are portrayed on Fox News, the channel he is watching, as anarchic disorder. Trump grows increasingly incensed, and that evening calls his top team into the situation room with one purpose in mind: to end the demonstrations by any means necessary.“I need to make sure that our streets are safe from those who are running amok trying to overthrow our administration,” he tells the group of top law enforcement, national security and military officials. A flicker of alarm ripples through the room as the president cites the Insurrection Act, saying it allows him to call up the national guard in key states to suppress what he calls the “rebellion”.Discerning the concern among his top officials, Trump gives them an ultimatum. He is in no mood to compromise or stand down – he did that in his first term in the face of “deep state” opposition. “I have been charged by the American people to make this country great again,” he states, “and I need to know right now that everybody in this room is on board.”The scenario was imaginary, but the discussion around it was very real. Dozens of men and women in a Washington DC-area hotel conference center were seated at tables arranged to resemble the White House situation room, wearing name tags denoting their part in the role-play. Prominent people from both parties were in character as the president of the United States, AKA Trump; the joint chiefs of staff; Republican and Democratic governors; Congress members; federal prosecutors; religious and business leaders; and community organizers.About 175 people participated in five exercises, bringing to the process an extraordinary wealth of bipartisan institutional knowledge. Among the lineup were senior officials from successive administrations of both parties, including the Trump administration.They came with a mission: to wargame Trump acting out the most extreme authoritarian elements of his agenda and explore what could be done, should he win in November, to protect democracy in the face of possible abuses of power. What they discovered could be used to inform public debate and sound the alarm about what most participants agreed was a woeful lack of preparation.View image in fullscreenThe event was being held as part of the Democracy Futures Project, an ambitious series of nonpartisan tabletop exercises. Spearheaded by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute, the role-playing games were staged in May and June amid tight security. A similar set of wargaming exercises, conducted under different leadership in 2020, pinpointed with uncanny precision Trump’s efforts to subvert that year’s presidential election.This year, the games included that imaginary scenario in which Trump, newly ensconced in the Oval Office, invokes the Insurrection Act to deploy military forces into American cities to fight supposed anarchy and crime.A second game looked at Trump’s threat to politicise federal agencies, including the justice department, and weaponise them against his political enemies. A third probed his immigration plans, which include dark warnings of mass roundups of undocumented immigrants and large-scale deportations.The Guardian attended two of the five exercises in the role of observers.The vocabulary of the exercises was that of the playground or sports field: the simulations were “games” revolving around “role-play”, with participants acting in the characters of Trump, his cabinet, military, law enforcement and congressional leaders, split into Trump’s “red” team and an oppositional “blue” team. Despite the linguistic levity, the purpose of the enactments could not have been more grave.“This is a pivotal moment for our democracy,” said Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey and former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, who took part in the Insurrection Act simulation. “I believe very strongly that, should Trump be elected, we’re going to see a vast change and our democracy will not be what it looks like today.”The sense of urgency surrounding the gatherings has intensified dramatically as a result of recent events. Since the war games were staged, Trump has been emboldened by the attempt on his life at a Pennsylvania rally, Joe Biden has stepped out of the race, and Kamala Harris has shot up to become the presumptive Democratic candidate. The course of the election – and its outcome – is now deeply uncertain.Participants attended under the so-called Chatham House rule, meaning that what was said in the simulations could be reported publicly but not who said it. Some individuals agreed to be named, including Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee; Elizabeth Neumann, deputy chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security under Trump; and Richard Danzig, the navy secretary under Bill Clinton.That so many prominent public figures were prepared to set aside entire days to delve deeply into a hypothetical was in itself a sign of these troubled and profoundly anxious times. “A lot of people are getting worried,” Whitman said, “and trying to figure out what guardrails are going to be left should Trump get in.”The danger with any attempt to role-play possible future scenarios is that it could sound paranoid or preposterous. Trump may say extreme things, but destroy democracy? Really? The co-founders of the project, who include Barton Gellman, the Brennan Center’s senior adviser and a former Atlantic journalist, and Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor, can point to two powerful arguments in support of the project. The first is the accuracy of the 2020 wargaming.The Transition Integrity Project imagined the then far-fetched idea that Trump might refuse to concede defeat, and, by claiming widespread fraud in mail-in ballots, unleash dark forces culminating in violence. Every implausible detail of the simulations came to pass in the lead-up to the US Capitol attack on 6 January 2021.The second ballast for the Brennan Center’s exercises was provided by Trump himself. All of this year’s scenarios were based on explicit statements from Trump and his closest allies, laying out his intended executive actions during a second term.Take the scenario that Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act to go against street protests. The 1807 law gives presidents the power to deploy the US military to suppress insurrections and quell civil unrest. Trump already considered this in 2020, when White House aides drafted a proclamation order invoking the act in preparation for suppressing Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. According to the Washington Post, similar drafts have been drawn up recently by Trump associates. .“This wasn’t a fanciful or unrealistic scenario,” said Peter Keisler, former acting US attorney general under George W Bush, who participated in the simulation. “We know people associated with Trump have been looking into how to use the Insurrection Act to deploy military force domestically against protests.”Keisler said that taking part in the exercise brought home to him how hard it would be to stop such a move: “It confirmed for me that for an authoritarian-minded president, deploying the military domestically could be one of the easiest and fastest levers of power that could be pulled, given how vaguely written the statute is.”View image in fullscreenIn the course of the Insurrection Act tabletop exercise, the person role-playing Trump initially met resistance from senior military figures who tried to cling to the Posse Comitatus Act barring federal troops from engaging in civilian law enforcement. As the scenario unfolded, Trump grew impatient and ended up firing the joint chiefs of staff, replacing them with military officers who would do his bidding and federalise the national guard.The way the exercise played out jibed with the fears of another of its participants, Paul Eaton, a former major general in the US army. “I’m not sure we can count on the military in a Trump world,” he said.Eaton pointed to a letter from May 2021 signed by 124 retired generals and admirals that propagated the lie that Biden stole the 2020 election from Trump. He added that studies had shown that almost one in seven of those prosecuted for storming the Capitol on January 6 had a military background.“When you have an armed force of 2 million-plus men and women who get a steady diet of lies from Fox News and social media, then you risk ending up with a military that’s going to question what is really true,” Eaton said.The second war game observed by the Guardian involved the scenario in which Trump, on day one, sets out to drain the swamp, free the January 6 “patriots”, and lock up his political enemies. “Let’s be an intelligent authoritarian,” the participant playing Trump told his red team allies, telling them to push the boundaries of what a president can do.Over the next few hours, the president sat on his phone firing off social media posts, while his cabinet executed his agenda. The justice department announced the investigation of Biden and others in his circle, and instructed the FBI to be very aggressive, to the extent of looking for even minor crimes.By the end of the day, they had arrested three of Biden’s grandchildren and, for good measure, Mike Pence’s daughter, “just to make sure Pence keeps his mouth shut”. They also withdrew all pending criminal charges against Trump.Trump’s team also prioritised schedule F: an effort to purge the civil service of people disloyal to the president. And they instructed the treasury department to look at tools at its disposal to withhold federal funding from top US universities under the guise that they were “harboring antisemitism”In response, the blue oppositional team called congressional hearings, tried to mobilize people across the country to protest against the president’s actions, staged acts of civil disobedience, and threatened lawsuits.At the end of the simulation, the consensus among many policy experts was that the blue team’s response felt weak and inadequate, with little agreement over message. “Blue has a catch-22 because they’re forces of normality, but all of this is not normal,” one participant said.Meanwhile, the red team’s efforts may have been alarming, but they didn’t get to even a fraction of what Trump has said he wants to accomplish in his first 90 days. “That is just the tip of the iceberg,” another participant said.As the Brennan Center has highlighted in its initial findings from the war games, participants came away from the simulations sobered by the experience. Above all, they discovered that there were far fewer effective restraints at their disposal than they had expected.Asked to identify the biggest lesson she had learned, Whitman said: “How little there is we can do.”Many of the attendees concluded that this time around, the courts cannot be relied upon as the primary means of staving off Trump’s attacks. In the thick of his 2020 “stop the steal” conspiracy to overturn the election results, courts did play a critical role, rejecting Trump’s claims of illegal voting in almost all cases.Trump’s many appointments to the federal judicial bench during his term, including his game-changing three appointments to the supreme court, have dented the hope that the judiciary will be a bastion against an authoritarian president.Participants also came away rattled by the thought that Trump and his associates are now much more experienced and adept at working the federal apparatus. As one of the Trump role-players put it: “This time around, they’re going to know where the door handles are.”Such apprehensions are disturbing. Yet the intention of the exercises was not to stun pro-democracy activists into depressed paralysis.Rather, it was, as Brennan put it, to show that “time is short, and the work of preparation demands more ambition and more hands on deck”.The exercises pointed to some positive guardrails that might still hold. State governors have their own reserves of independent authority, which, if combined with the capabilities of state attorneys general, could block, or at least slow down, federal abuses.Federal officials, who are in Trump’s sights as he threatens to politicise the top of the civil service in his attack on the “deep state”, also have the ability to safeguard the workings of democratic government. It may be easier said than done in the face of mass firings, but the Brennan Center is calling for a “well-resourced campaign” to persuade civil servants to stay the course and not resign, and provide them with legal support in case of retaliation.The last resort when all else fails, many participants suggested, would probably be the power of public protest. “Public opinion, mobilized by a powerful communications strategy, can help set boundaries on authoritarian behavior,” Brennan said in its initial findings.Keisler, the former acting US attorney general, said that the war game he attended shook him more than he had expected: “Do I think there’s a genuine jeopardy to our democracy? Absolutely. Do I think the country is ready for it? No. Do I think it’s guaranteed to end well? No.”He added: “And this was just a game. Then there’s real life, and that’s ahead of us.” More

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      Bill Barr complicit in misleading voter fraud statement’s release – watchdog

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      The former attorney general Bill Barr was personally involved in a decision to release an unusual and misleading justice department statement on the eve of the 2020 election suggesting there may have been voter fraud in Pennsylvania, according to a new inspector general’s report that was released on Thursday.The 76-page report from the justice department’s Office of the Inspector General focused on the department’s handling of an investigation into nine military ballots that were found discarded in the trash in Luzerne county, Pennsylvania. Barr briefed Trump on the ballot issue before it was public and the president subsequently disclosed it in a radio interview. David Freed, the US attorney overseeing the matter, also released a statement and letter detailing the investigation.The announcement was highly charged because it came at a time when Trump was warning the election would be rigged because of mail-in ballots. It was also highly unusual – justice department policy does not allow employees to comment on ongoing investigations before charges are filed, except in limited circumstances. Separate guidance instructs department employees that they should be “particularly sensitive to safeguarding the Department’s reputation for fairness, neutrality, and nonpartisanship”.Federal law enforcement officials were notified of the discarded ballots on 18 September 2020 and investigators quickly became aware that evidence might not exist to support criminal charges. The seasonal employee who discarded the ballots appeared to have a mental disability, FBI agents noted on 22 September, and was “remorseful”, “felt horrible” and “never voted/doesn’t vote/didn’t pay attention to it”. The suspect, who was quickly fired, reportedly believed incorrectly the military ballots were fraudulent and discarded them without telling anyone.Nonetheless, Barr briefed Trump on the matter and later called Freed to discuss releasing a public statement.“Nearly every DOJ lawyer we interviewed – both career employees and Trump Administration political appointees – emphasized how ‘unusual’ it would be for the department to issue a public statement containing details about an ongoing criminal investigation, particularly before any charges are filed,” the inspector general report said. “As one then US Attorney told us: ‘If [we] don’t have a charge, we don’t say anything about an investigation; we just don’t do that.’”Barr’s behavior “was certainly not consistent” with that guidance, the report said. Barr did not agree to a voluntary interview and the inspector general does not have the power to subpoena testimony from former justice department employees.“Providing this information to the President, who was not bound by the Department’s policies prohibiting comment on ongoing investigations and who had a political interest in publicizing the investigation, created the risk that the President would use the Department’s non-public investigative information to advance his own political aims,” the report said. “A risk that was in fact realized when President Trump referenced the ballots on a national radio show the next morning.”Freed and other justice department employees considered releasing a statement in late October 2020 when they decided to close the investigation without charges. The department’s public integrity section had wanted to issue a press release to correct the false public impression about the possibility of fraud, but ultimately the department did not. It was not until 15 January 2021 – well after election day – that the Department of Justice released a statement saying it was closing the investigation.Freed, who was the US attorney for the middle district of Pennsylvania at the time, violated justice department policies on not commenting on ongoing investigations and a requirement to consult with the department’s public integrity section before making a statement.“I handled this investigation properly from start to finish and my public statements were explicitly approved by the AG or his senior staff,” Freed said in a statement to CNN.While highly critical of their conduct, the inspector general said it could not conclude either had committed misconduct “because of ambiguity as to the applicability of Barr’s authority to approve the release of the statement”. It also said that justice department policy did not specifically proscribe what Barr could tell the president.The inspector general’s report details how other senior justice department employees were horrified when they saw that Freed had released information. “It’s appalling. We don’t do this,” the director of the department’s election crimes branch told investigators. “There wasn’t even a charging document. I mean, they ended up declining it. There’s no – I’ve never seen anything like this … I’m appalled. This is crazy.” More

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      Donald Trump claims to ‘know nothing’ about Project 2025

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      Donald Trump is trying to claim he has “nothing to do” with Project 2025, a political roadmap created by people close to him for his potential second term.The project, which is led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, seeks to crack down on various issues including immigration, reproductive rights, environmental protections and LGBTQ+ rights. It also aims to replace federal employees with Trump loyalists across the government.Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social network: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”The former president’s post came a day after the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, said the US was in the midst of a “second American revolution” that can be bloodless “if the left allows it to be”. He made the comments on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, adding that Republicans are “in the process of taking this country back”.In response to Trump’s post, several critics were quick to point out that it appears unlikely that he is unaware of Project 2025, given that many individuals involved in the project are his closest allies.“Many people involved in Project 2025 are close to Trump world & have served in his previous admin,” CNN’s Alayna Treene said.Economist and Guardian columnist Robert Reich wrote: “Don’t be fooled. The playbook is written by more than 20 officials Trump appointed in his first term. It is the clearest vision we have of a 2nd Trump presidency.”The Trump campaign has previously pushed back on claims that he would follow the policy ideas set out in Project 2025 or by other conservative groups. His campaign told Axios in November 2023 that the campaign’s own policy agenda, called Agenda47, is “the only official comprehensive and detailed look at what President Trump will do when he returns to the White House”, though the campaign added that it was “appreciative” of suggestions from others.Still, Heritage claimed credit for a bevy of Trump policy proposals in his first term, based on the group’s 2017 version of the Mandate for Leadership. The group calculated that 64% of its policy recommendations were implemented or proposed by Trump in some way during his first year in office.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Heritage Foundation also created the first Mandate for Leadership that heavily influenced Ronald Reagan’s administration in 1981.The foundation claims that Reagan gave copies of the manifesto to “every member of his Cabinet” and that nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations it laid out were either “adopted or attempted” by Reagan. More

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      The Guardian view on the WikiLeaks plea deal: good for Julian Assange, not journalism | Editorial

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      Julian Assange should never have been charged with espionage by the US. The release of the WikiLeaks founder from custody in the UK is good news, and it is especially welcome to his family and supporters. He is due to plead guilty to a single charge of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents at a hearing early on Wednesday, but is not expected to face further jail time. The court in Saipan, a remote Pacific island which is a US territory, is expected to approve the deal, crediting him for the five years he has already spent on remand in prison.His opportunity to live with his young family comes thanks to Australian diplomacy under the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, who had made clear his desire for a resolution, and the Biden administration’s keenness to get a controversial case off its plate, particularly in an election year. Seventeen of the charges have been dropped. The one that remains, however, is cause for serious alarm. It was the Trump administration that brought this case. But while the Biden administration has dropped 17 of the 18 charges, it insisted on a charge under the 1917 Espionage Act, rather than the one first brought against him of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.This is no triumph for press freedom. Mr Assange’s plea has prevented the setting of a frightening judicial precedent for journalists, avoiding a decision that might bind future courts. Nonetheless, this is the first conviction for basic journalistic efforts under the 1917 act.Using espionage charges was always a bad and cynical move. The case relates to hundreds of thousands of leaked documents about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well as diplomatic cables, which were made public by WikiLeaks working with the Guardian and other media organisations. They revealed appalling abuses by the US and other governments, which would not otherwise have been exposed – and for which no one has been held liable, despite the pursuit of Mr Assange.National security laws are necessary. But it is also necessary to acknowledge that governments keep secrets for bad reasons as well as good. Alarmingly, the Espionage Act allows no public interest defence, preventing defendants from discussing the material leaked, why they shared it, and why they believe the public should know about it. The Obama administration correctly identified the chilling effect that spying charges could have on investigative journalism, and chose not to bring them on that basis. The Biden administration – which proclaims itself a champion of press freedom globally – should not have pursued them. The UK government should never have agreed to Mr Assange’s extradition.The bad news is that the prosecutorial policy is now clear. Federal prosecutors can chalk this one up as a win. It is possible that future administrations could take this case as encouragement to pursue the press under the Espionage Act. It is likely that an emboldened second Trump administration would do so. The Republican candidate has repeatedly cast the media as his “real opponent” and the enemy of the people.The political solution to this lengthy saga is welcome, particularly given the reported impact on Mr Assange’s health after years holed up in London’s Ecuadorian embassy and then in Belmarsh prison. But the threat to press freedom has not ended. Its defence cannot rest either. More

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      in US Politics

      Ex-Trump security adviser backtracks on proposal to send all Marines to Asia

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      Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien – tipped to play a leading role if the ex-president returns to the White House – backtracked on parts of his proposal to sever US-China economic ties, an aspect of which called for sending the entire US Marine Corps to Asia.O’Brien, who recently submitted a 5,000-word article outlining his thinking to Foreign Affairs, explained on Sunday that instead of the “entire US Marine Corps”, it would be only the “fighting force”. And he said some Marines would still be stationed at bases like California’s Camp Pendleton and North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune.“We want to stop a war, and the way to stop the war is through strength,” O’Brien said on Sunday’s edition of CBS Face the Nation. “Moving the Marine Corps to the Pacific and moving the carrier battle group to the Pacific would show the kind of strength needed to deter a war.”In the essay, titled The Return of Peace Through Strength, O’Brien argued for the US to help expand the militaries of Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam; increase military assistance to Taiwan; and boost missile defense as well as fighter jet protection in the region.He also called for renewed plutonium and enriched uranium production – as well as the resumption of live nuclear-weapons testing.O’Brien cites concerns over an aging US nuclear arsenal as his primary argument in favor of abandoning the current nuclear testing moratorium.The military expansion would go beyond the measures Joe Biden has taken to counter Chinese ambitions in the Asia-Pacific region as the president seeks re-election against Trump in November.And on Sunday, Trump’s hawkish foreign policy adviser from 2019 to 2021 appeared to echo an earlier diplomatic strategy when Trump threatened to pull the US out of Asia and Europe unless its strategic partners met defense spending targets.O’Brien said US allies have fielded “some, but not enough” of the cost of housing US troops in their countries, and he called on them to “step up to the plate”.The US currently stations nearly half of all American military deployed abroad in Japan, South Korea and Guam, along with small detachments in Taiwan and the Marshall Islands.“We need our allies to step up,” O’Brien said. “America can’t do this alone.“Sometimes you have to be tough, you have to show tough love to your allies. And just like with family members sometimes you have to be tough with your family members.” More

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      in US Politics

      Both sides of gun issue seek to stir up US voters as NRA influence wanes

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      Anti-gun-control groups and gun-safety advocates are launching hefty voter-mobilization drives this year with the stakes high in the fall elections given the stark differences on gun violence policy between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.But the long-powerful National Rifle Association (NRA), which has been beset with financial and legal headaches for several years, is not expected to be nearly as active as in 2016, when it spent more than $31m to back Trump’s victorious campaign by boosting his political fortunes in key states, say gun experts and ex-NRA insiders.Now, though, other anti-gun-control groups are trying to take up the slack.For instance, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), an influential firearms industry lobbying group, has begun an eight-figure voter-mobilization drive to help pro-gun interests defeat President Biden, whose strong support for gun-control measures it finds anathema.The NSSF’s general counsel, Larry Keane, said that the organization’s “GunVote” campaign will focus on seven to nine battleground states, where it will mount voter-registration, education and get-out-the-vote efforts to help Trump win the presidency again.On the other side of this year’s election brawl over gun control, Everytown for Gun Safety is planning a large effort to get its millions of supporters to help re-elect Biden and defeat Trump, who has a record of siding firmly with pro-gun priorities.“We’re going to knock on doors, make calls, rally and campaign for President Biden,” said Nick Suplina, the senior vice-president for law and policy at Everytown, which claims nearly 10 million supporters including mayors, students, gun owners, teachers and others.The stakes seem higher than usual given Biden’s successes as president backing new gun-control measures such as the first new law in three decades boosting gun safety, and Biden’s talk of doing more if he’s re-elected, including fighting for an assault weapons ban, which would probably need Democratic control of Congress to enact.By contrast, Trump has often reiterated his fealty to the pro-gun lobby, which characterized his presidency. At last month’s NRA annual meeting, Trump earned a ringing endorsement and pledged that if he wins, “no one will lay a finger on your firearms”.But the once deep-pocketed and five-million-member NRA remains mired in internal and financial headaches: its annual revenues have dropped for several years while its legal expenses have risen.The NRA’s problems were underscored when its longtime top executive, Wayne LaPierre, resigned in January as he was about to go on trial in New York, where he was convicted of looting the organization to enjoy lavish personal perks including fancy vacations and expensive clothes.“The NRA is going to again be a peripheral player for lack of funding this election cycle, and that could hurt Trump in several battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota,” a former NRA board member said.“It’s a vacuum compared to 2016 when the NRA was robustly engaged,” the ex-board member added.Longtime observers of gun-control fights agree.Robert Spitzer, the author of several books on gun issues and an emeritus political science professor at Suny Cortland in New York, said the NRA was “as strongly behind [Trump] as they have been before”.“However, the organization simply does not possess the money or personnel to be as influential as they were in 2016, when they spent over $31m on his campaign, and over $70m on Republican efforts around the country. Still, the gun issue will continue to be salient to an important segment of the Trump base.”Spitzer added: “Other gun groups, such as the NSSF and state gun groups, will be working to supplant the NRA’s traditional dominance in national politics. They do not possess the degree of organization, experience and reach as the NRA of old, but they will ratchet up their efforts.”That’s what the NSSF, whose members include such gun giants as Sturm, Ruger & Co and Smith & Wesson, plus other anti-gun-control groups say they intend to do. “There’s a stark difference between Trump and Biden,” Keane said in explaining the NSSF’s hefty effort this year. “It’s clear there are ongoing challenges at the NRA.”Some ex-NRA leaders credit NSSF with trying to fill the NRA’s vacuum. “NSSF has attempted, and continues, to fill the gap left by a weakened NRA,” Jim Baker, the NRA’s former top lobbyist, said.The NRA did not respond to a call seeking comments.Further, the Trump campaign in tandem with the Republican National Committee has launched Gun Owners for Trump including firearms makers and gun-rights advocates such as Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation; Women for Gun Rights; and some NRA officials.To spur more pro-gun votes at the polls, Trump has spoken twice this year at NRA events. At their May meeting, Trump employed some incendiary conspiracy-mongering, telling the crowd that Biden “has a 40-year record of trying to rip firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGun-control advocates and the Biden campaign are using Trump’s own pro-gun pledges and cavalier attitude towards gun violence to rev up their backers, including younger voters and women.After an Iowa school shooting in January, for instance, Trump callously opined that “we have to get over it”, a clip of which is being circulated by Democrats and pro-gun-control advocates.Likewise, another clip in circulation shows Trump boasting to NRA members in May that he “did nothing” as president on guns. Actually, Trump signed a “bump stock” ban after the country’s largest gun massacre ever in Las Vegas, but the supreme court overturned it this month.Biden cemented his gun-control credentials in 2022 when, after the Uvalde, Texas, school massacre, he pushed hard for a gun-safety bill that passed on a bipartisan basis, becoming the first new gun-control law in almost three decades.To energize his supporters, Biden spoke to an Everytown training event for about 1,000 gun-safety volunteers including students on 12 June, where he cited several major achievements, including setting up a White House office focused on curbing gun violence and beefing up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Explosives and Firearms.Biden urged a ban on assault-style weapons and universal background checks for purchases of firearms, both goals he has stressed before.“We need you to overcome the unrelenting opposition of the gun lobby,” Biden said.Suplina said Everytown’s plans for targeting states to help Biden and how much they intend to spend overall this election cycle were not ready to be announced, but he did reveal that Everytown intends to support 465 of its volunteers who are running for office this year. The majority of these races are state and local.Further, Everytown will be backing Senate and House candidates who support gun-safety measures, Suplina said.Overall, Everytown spent about $55m on 2020 election efforts.Other gun-control advocates have broad election plans“This cycle, GIiffords will use its unique identity as a gun owner and survivor-led organization to reach a broad gun safety coalition in battlegrounds – including Democrats, Republicans, young voters, gun owners, and people of color,” Emma Brown, executive director of Giffords, said in a statementThe group plans on “supporting gun safety champions in key House and Senate races, [and] communicating the Biden-Harris administration’s historic gun safety accomplishments in states across the map,” she added.Looking ahead, Spitzer stressed that Biden “has continued to speak out on gun safety, and gun-safety groups will surely redouble their efforts on his behalf, not only to help him get re-elected, but to advance the cause of down-ballot Democrats running for Congress and state offices, where the fate of many gun laws lie”. 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