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List comes after Trump order in June directed agencies to use emergency authority to speed projects amid economic downturn More
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US president suggests people vote in person and by mail and if system works it will stop two votes
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Trump suggests people vote twice to test mail-in system, which would be illegal – video
Donald Trump has suggested that people in the state of North Carolina should vote twice in the November election, once in person and once by mail, although doing so is a crime.
“Let them send it in and let them go vote,” Trump said in an interview with WECT-TV in Wilmington, North Carolina, on Wednesday when asked about the security of mail-in votes. “And if the system is as good as they say it is then obviously they won’t be able to vote” in person.
Voting more than once in an election is illegal.
“President Trump outrageously encouraged” North Carolinians “to break the law in order to help him sow chaos in our election,” said the state attorney general, Josh Stein, in a tweet. “Make sure you vote, but do NOT vote twice! I will do everything in my power to make sure the will of the people is upheld in November.”
The US attorney general, William Barr, told CNN that Trump “was trying to make the point that the ability to monitor this system is not good”. When told that voting twice is illegal, he said, “I don’t know what the law in the particular state says.”
Barr said mail-in ballots for the election on 3 November could be vulnerable to fraud, echoing an argument Trump has made to denounce the use of voting by mail. Trump has previously said the voting method is susceptible to large-scale fraud, although experts say voter fraud of any kind is extremely rare in the United States.
Voting by mail is not new in the US – nearly one in four voters cast presidential ballots in 2016 that way. A record number of mail-in ballots are expected for the election due to concerns about in-person voting during the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump has accused Democrats of trying to steal the election by pushing the use of mail-in voting. The re-election campaign of Trump has recently sued states like New Jersey and Nevada for expanding access to mail-in voting.
Democrats have said Trump and fellow Republicans are attempting to suppress the vote to help their side.
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Donald Trump signed a memo on Wednesday that threatened to cut funding to Democratic-led cities that the administration has characterized as “lawless” and “anarchist jurisdictions”, using his office to launch an extraordinary – if legally ineffective – attack on his political opponents ahead of the November election.“My administration will not allow federal tax dollars to fund cities that allow themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones,” the memorandum reads. “It is imperative that the federal government review the use of federal funds by jurisdictions that permit anarchy, violence, and destruction in America’s cities.”The document compels William Barr, the attorney general, to develop a list of jurisdictions that “permitted violence and the destruction of property to persist and have refused to undertake reasonable measures to counteract these criminal activities” within the next fortnight. It also instructs Russell Vought, the White House budget director, to issue guidance in the next month on how federal agencies can restrict or disfavor “anarchist jurisdictions” in providing federal grants.Today @POTUS made clear that we will not continue to funnel taxpayer money to lawless cities that fail to restore law and order in their communities. We will explore all options. https://t.co/BDScgIG2uK— Russ Vought (@RussVought45) September 3, 2020
The president has often suggested that his political opponents, including Joe Biden, want to defund the police departments, despite the fact that most Democrats, including Biden, have said they do not endorse that approach to police reform. Pushing hardline “law and order” rhetoric, Trump has also pushed baseless conspiracy theories about leftwing violence amid protests against police brutality and systemic racism while refusing to condemn rightwing and white supremacist vigilantism.The memorandum that the White House shared on Wednesday night, which specifically names Portland, New York City, Seattle and Washington DC as examples of jurisdictions might lose federal funding, is unlikely to result in any of those cities losing significant funding, according to legal experts. Congress determines how funding is distributed, and agencies cannot “willy nilly restrict funding”, said Sam Berger, a former senior policy advisor at the Office of Management and Budget during the Obama administration.The five-page memorandum “reads like a campaign press release”, Berger told the Guardian. “The first two pages are a bizarre diatribe – that’s not what a government document looks like.”Even if federal agencies are able to find justification to reduce funding to certain cities, perhaps via grants linked to law enforcement, any funding restrictions are unlikely to hold up to legal challenges, he added.“The president obviously has no power to pick and choose which cities to cut off from congressionally appropriated funding,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law scholar at Harvard, and recently the co-author of To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment. Trump “has no defunding spigot. The power of the purse belongs to Congress, not the Executive. Donald Trump must have slept through high school civics,” Tribe said in an email.New York governor Andrew Cuomo said the memo was “an illegal stunt”, noting that Trump “is not a king. He cannot ‘defund’ NYC.”This latest move from the president follows through on his growing disdain for American cities run by Democrats. During his speech at the Republican National Convention last week, Trump railed against “rioters and criminals spreading mayhem in Democrat-run cities” and spoke of “left-wing anarchy and mayhem in Minneapolis, Chicago, and other cities”. More
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Chinese embassy in US says move, which limits meetings and university visits without approval, contradicts ‘openness and freedom’ More
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Joe Biden has described school closures as a ‘national emergency’ as he sought to put the coronavirus pandemic back at the heart of the US election campaign, after two weeks of Trump seeking to capitalise on sporadic scenes of violence in cities to push a ‘law and order’ theme
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Donald Trump took a trip to a place called Biden’s America on Tuesday. It is a strange land where the president of the United States is a helpless guest, a doomed corner of his own country that is somehow ruled by a former vice president.It is a topsy-turvy place, this Biden’s America. Occasionally, the president can regain his magical ruling powers by summoning assorted minions in uniforms and incanting a spell with his thumbs to tweet the words LAW AND ORDER.But mostly our president is lawless and disorderly, wandering through a country that has been laid low by a virus from China, a candidate from Delaware, and a bunch of friendly questions from Fox News.It’s weird that the Republican party finds it so hard to see homegrown terrorists in places like KenoshaHe is as befuddled as anyone on Facebook about what the hell is going on around him. But rather than trying to fix this dysfunctional version of the land of the free, he prefers to scare the bejesus out of white voters so they might forget this historic pandemic and recession.To steady his wobbly step, Trump leaned on two men who best represent what he understands by “law and order”. Sitting on one side of our impotent leader was Chad Wolf, the illegally appointed acting secretary of homeland security, who likes to send unidentified paramilitaries to assault American citizens but insists that they are not “the Gestapo, storm troopers or thugs”.Sitting on the other side was Bill Barr, the totally impartial attorney general – who called Black Lives Matter protesters “essentially Bolsheviks” – driven by some kind of religious lust for power. Heaven knows that politics and religion are the kind of bedfellows this president would never lust for.Together, these three outlaws descended on a small outer suburb of Milwaukee and Chicago home to fewer than 100,000 souls, where the Bolsheviks have decided to stage a pivotal uprising against everything good.The facts can be tricky here on the mostly white shores of Lake Michigan, but one thing is clear: Trump cannot feel your pain in Biden’s America.His audience at what this White House called “a community safety roundtable” included a pointless smattering of local suffering – mere pimples on the face of a horrified nation.There were the owners of an office furniture store. “You got hit pretty hard. That’s all right,” said our discomforter-in-chief. “It’s going to get rebuilt.”There was the owner of a candle store. “That’s a very fancy name you have there,” said the man trying to scare white America to its core. “But I’ll bet it was beautiful. Is it – are you going to rebuild? Will you be rebuilding?”“We were not destroyed, very fortunately,” said the candle lady.“Well, we’ll be giving you some help,” Trump said anyway.You never know, the Bolsheviks might come tomorrow.Then there was the camera store guy, who has been in business for 109 years, according to Trump.“You’re insured, right,” he asked. Yes, said the camera guy. “And so they’re helping, and they’re being responsible?” Why yes, said the store owner.So much suffering caused by the strange revolutionary forces of Biden’s America, gathering on the shores of a great lake for no great reason.“To stop the political violence, we must also confront the radical ideology that includes this violence,” said our explainer-in-chief. “Reckless, far-left politicians continue to push the destructive message that our nation and our law enforcement are oppressive or racist. They’ll throw out any word that comes to them.”It’s almost as if these politicians throw out words like bullets fired into the back of a father climbing into his car where his three children were waiting for him.You see, in Trump’s version of Biden’s America, violence springs like Athena from the head of Joe Biden, or AOC, or Lenin. It has no relationship to Jacob Blake, who was not named by Trump or his sidekicks at their community safety roundtable. It has nothing to do George Floyd, or Breonna Taylor, or Ahmaud Arbery.It doesn’t even have anything to do with Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager charged with killing two protesters and injuring another in Kenosha, as part of a self-styled white militia that arrived from out of state. Somehow the town’s non-racist law enforcement turned a blind eye to Rittenhouse, walking the streets with his AR-15-style assault rifle, and his friends even after the shootings.Some types of radical ideology are good, and some are bad. The original Bolsheviks understood that distinction pretty well.There are many strange things that happen in Biden’s America. As Trump told Laura Ingraham of Fox News on Monday, there were people wearing black clothes on “a plane from a certain city this weekend” who were headed to the Republican convention that just ended. “A lot of people were on the plane to do big damage,” said the man tasked with protecting the constitution, as well as a nation of confused citizens.As if that isn’t bad enough, there are police who shoot unarmed civilians because they can’t take the pressure. It’s a bit like playing golf, Trump told the audibly horrified – but otherwise entirely supportive – Fox News interviewer.“You know, a choker, they choke,” Trump explained, somehow managing to dehumanize both the shooting victim and the police officer who pulled the trigger. “Shooting the guy in the back many times. Couldn’t you have done something different? … But they choke. Just like in a golf tournament, they miss a three-foot.”It’s weird enough that a Republican party that campaigned for so long on the war on terrorism finds it so hard to see homegrown terrorists in places like Kenosha. It’s weirder still that the party now blindly follows a man who likens shooting someone in the back to missing a putt.But the weirdest thing in Biden’s America is that Donald Trump can only echo Joe Biden. One of them said this week, “I know most cops are good and decent people. I know the risk they take every day with their lives.” The other said: “The vast and overwhelming majority of police officers are honorable, courageous, and devoted public servants.” Which candidate hates law enforcement again?The last Republican president to promise to keep us safe was George W Bush, running for re-election after 9/11. But every few days in Trump’s America, we lose more Americans to the rampant pandemic than to the terrorist attacks that traumatized this nation 19 years ago.That’s not just weird. It’s the symptom of a political sickness inflicted by three and a half years of a lawless and lying president. This is Trump’s America, and we just vote in it.• Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist More
Last week, as the Louis DeJoy testified before the House of Representatives about mail slowdowns around the country, the Republican congressman Jim Jordan praised the embattled postmaster general’s career as the chief executive of New Breed Logistics, saying DeJoy had an “amazing record in business”.But court documents reviewed by the Guardian allege that as DeJoy expanded his father’s shipping company into a logistics empire, he alienated his own family, pushing his brother Dominick out of the company and triggering an acrimonious legal battle with long-lasting consequences. The lawsuit and its outcome provide new insight into how Louis DeJoy came to control the company that made him wealthy and put him in a position to become a top Republican donor and, later, the postmaster general.A complaint filed by Dominick DeJoy in North Carolina state court in January 2000 alleges that Louis DeJoy:forged his brother’s signature to establish joint bank accounts in both of their names.
forced his brother to sign away his ownership stake in New Breed.
restructured New Breed’s ownership to exclude Dominick from the profits.
concealed evidence of the new ownership structure from his brother.
Family patriarch Dominick DeJoy Sr founded New Breed in 1968 as a small-time trucking concern in New York and New Jersey. After suffering a debilitating injury in 1977, he passed control of the company to his sons Dominick Jr and Michael; Louis, the eldest, was in college at the time, studying to become an accountant. Dominick did not go to college, instead taking over New Breed’s operations after graduating from high school.Louis graduated the following year and became a certified public accountant shortly after, and returned to New York to join his brothers at the helm of their father’s company. For the next decade, Louis was New Breed’s chief financial officer, handling the company’s bank accounts and tax filings.Together, the three brothers reincorporated New Breed with Louis as president and each brother owning a third of the company. They then pushed business outward from the New York area, expanding operations nationwide and moving the headquarters to North Carolina; according to the court filing, the brothers only held one in-person board meeting over the course of more than 15 years, despite Dominick and Louis living just a few miles apart in Greensboro.“Dominick Jr trusted Louis, believed he was a capable [accountant], and believed that Louis would responsibly look after all three brothers’ interests,” said the court filing.Some time in the 1990s, Louis and his brother Michael allegedly executed a kind of financial shell game to deprive Dominick Jr of his stake in the family business, according to the complaint. Michael established a new set of holding companies that did business with New Breed’s clients, and Louis allegedly told his brother Dominick multiple times that he would be entitled to a third of the proceeds from these new companies.Louis allegedly sent his own employees to intercept the documents and prevent Dominick from seeing themIn fact, according to Dominick’s complaint, the new arrangement gave Dominick no equity in the companies whatsoever.It wasn’t until April 1998, when Louis undertook to reorganize the entire company once again, that Dominick alleges he became aware of what he claimed was a scheme to defraud him. The ownership structure of the reorganized company would reduce Dominick’s share in New Breed by more than half, giving him a 15% stake instead of the one-third stake he thought he had. According to the court documents, Louis and Michael “conspired and did force” Dominick to sign the agreement.The following year, according to the court documents, Dominick made an even more shocking discovery: Louis had established multiple accounts in his name at local banks and investment trusts, forging Dominick’s signature in order to set up accounts of which they were supposedly the joint owners. Louis then deposited Dominick’s New Breed earnings into these accounts and either spent the money on his own personal expenses or funneled it back into New Breed, according to the court documents. When certain employees tried to send evidence of these fake accounts to Dominick, Louis allegedly sent his own employees to intercept the documents and prevent Dominick from seeing them.No sooner did Dominick sue Louis than New Breed sued Dominick on Louis’s behalf, demanding Dominick drop his lawsuit. Court records show that the cases were consolidated in a state business court later that year. Records also show that the presiding judge arranged in January 2001 for Dominick to depose an employee of Wachovia Securities, a bank that was considering an outside investment in New Breed. But later that month, just two days before the deposition was scheduled to take place, the brothers reached a confidential settlement and the judge dismissed the case. More
Donald Trump told Sarah Sanders she would have to “go to North Korea and take one for the team”, after Kim Jong-un winked at the then White House press secretary during a summit in Singapore in June 2018.“Kim Jong-un hit on you!” a delighted Trump joked, according to Sanders’ new memoir. “He did! He fucking hit on you!”Speaking for Myself will be released next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.Rather than a tell-all by a former staffer or a burn-all by a hostile family member, the book is a paean to the president by a loyal follower with the subtitle Faith, Freedom and the Fight of Our Lives Inside the Trump White House.Sanders is from a notable Republican family – her father is Mike Huckabee, a candidate for the presidential nomination in 2008 and 2016 – and reportedly has her eye on a run for governor in Arkansas.However, somewhat in the manner of leaked sections that took aim at the former national security adviser John Bolton after he turned on Trump, Sanders does describe boorish or misogynistic behavior by the president and senior aides that may make campaign aides wince, particularly as Trump trails Joe Biden among women.Of the incident with Kim, whom Trump courted assiduously in the first two years of his presidency, Sanders describes a session at the Singapore talks in which the dictator “reluctantly” accepted a Tic Tac from Trump, who “dramatically blew into the air to reassure Kim it was just a breath mint” and not a capsule of poison.The two men also talked about sports, including women’s soccer. Then, Sanders writes, she looked up “to notice Kim staring at me. We made direct eye contact and Kim nodded and appeared to wink at me. I was stunned. I quickly looked down and continued taking notes.“… All I could think was, ‘What just happened? Surely Kim Jong-un did not just mark me!?’”Later, in the presidential “Beast” limousine on the way to the airport, Sanders relayed the incident to Trump and his then chief of staff, John Kelly.“Kim Jong-un hit on you!” Trump said. “He did! He fucking hit on you!”Sanders, a devout Christian who discusses her faith throughout her book, does not spell out the presidential expletive. But she does write that she told Trump that was not what she meant, and said: “Sir, please stop.”Kelly backed up the president and Trump joked: “Well, Sarah, that settles it. You’re going to North Korea and taking one for the team! Your husband and kids will miss you, but you’ll be a hero to your country!”Trump and Kelly, Sanders writes, “howled with laughter” as the car drove on.Trump has met Kim three times – in Singapore, in Hanoi and in the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea. He has not convinced Kim to give up his nuclear weapons, which Sanders says would take a “miracle”.In fact, observers say, Pyongyang has increased its arsenal significantly. Trump’s critics also say his mercurial approaches to Kim have damaged relations with key allies, including Seoul.In his own memoir of the Trump administration, Bolton does not mention the Singapore incident Sanders describes, though he does say Trump talked sports with Kim and “handed out mints”. Bolton also says aides did not want to leave Trump alone with Kim, lest he make damaging concessions.Sanders describes other aspects of Trump’s North Korea policy, including interactions with Dennis Rodman, the former NBA star who has established a unique relationship with Kim, and the release in May 2018 of three Americans formerly held by Pyongyang.She does not mention Otto Warmbier, a student from Ohio held in the North before being returned to the US in June 2017, in a coma and showing evidence of torture. The 22-year-old died soon after.Warmbier’s parents have said they hold “Kim and his evil regime … responsible for unimaginable cruelty and inhumanity. No excuses or lavish praise can change that.”Though Trump admitted in Hanoi that “some really bad things happened to Otto”, he also said: “Kim tells me that he didn’t know about it and I will take him at his word.” More
