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      Kushner camping tale one of many bizarre scenes in latest Trump book

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      Kushner camping tale one of many bizarre scenes in latest Trump book Confidence Man by Maggie Haberman reveals racism, transphobia and ignorance from ex-president’s time in powerIn a meeting supposedly about campaign strategy in the 2020 election, Donald Trump implied his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, might be brutally attacked, even raped, should he ever go camping.Trump asked May at debut meeting why Boris Johnson was not PM, book saysRead more“Ivanka wants to rent one of those big RVs,” Trump told bemused aides, according to a new book by Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, before gesturing to his daughter’s husband.“This skinny guy wants to do it. Can you imagine Jared and his skinny ass camping? It’d be like something out of Deliverance.”According to Haberman, Trump then “made noises mimicking the banjo theme song from the 1972 movie about four men vacationing in rural Georgia who are attacked, pursued and in one case brutally raped by a local resident”.The bizarre scene is just one of many in Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, which will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.The book has been extensively trailed. Headlines drawn from it have concerned Trump’s racism (he thought Black White House staffers were waiters); his transphobia (he asked if a notional young questioner was “cocked or uncocked”); and his belligerent ignorance (he mistook a health aide for a military adviser because he wore uniform, and asked if he could bomb Mexican drug labs).Trump’s undiplomatic crudity has also been put on display. According to Haberman, he asked the British prime minister, Theresa May, to “imagine if some animals with tattoos raped your daughter and she got pregnant” and called Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, “that bitch”.In other shocking scenes, Trump is reported to have said he could not afford to alienate white supremacists because “a lot of these people vote”, and to have been called a fascist by John Kelly, his second chief of staff.Haberman also writes that when the liberal supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was battling cancer, Trump sarcastically prayed for her health and asked: “How much longer do you think she has?”Haberman even reports that Trump may have called a Democratic congresswoman, pretending to be a Washington Post reporter and angling for comments about himself.The story about Trump mocking Kushner’s suitability for outdoor pursuits, meanwhile, is of a piece with other scenes in which Trump is shown to mock and belittle his son-in-law.According to Haberman, Trump criticised Kushner for observing religious customs (“‘Fucking Shabbat,’ Trump groused, asking no one in particular if his Jewish son-in-law was really religious or just avoiding work”) and for being effete.“He sounds like a child,” Trump is said to have commented in 2017, after Kushner spoke to reporters following an appearance before a congressional committee.In a scene which echoes the former Trump aide Peter Navarro’s description of an abortive campaign coup against Kushner, Trump is also shown resolving to fire Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, by tweet – but being talked out of doing so.Trump’s political career has generated a stream of books by Washington reporters and tell-alls by ex-White House staffers. Nonetheless, Confidence Man is eagerly awaited, touted as “the book Trump fears most”.Haberman has covered Trump since his days as a New York property magnate, reality TV host and celebrity political blowhard. Known in some circles as “the Trump whisperer”, she was even seen taking calls from the then president in a documentary about the Times, The Fourth Estate, which was released in 2018.Having written countless scoops about the Trump White House, Haberman has continued to cover a post-presidency in which Trump has maintained control of the Republican party while seemingly plotting another campaign, having escaped being brought to account over the January 6 insurrection.The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against AmericaRead moreLike other authors of Trump books, Haberman draws on interviews with the former president. As with other authors, Trump appears to have enjoyed the process. At one point, Haberman writes, he “turned to the two aides he had sitting in on our interview, gestured toward me with his hand, and said, ‘I love being with her; she’s like my psychiatrist.’”But such comfort may have prompted Trump to reveal more than might have been advised.In one exchange that has excited widespread comment, Trump admitted taking classified material from the White House – a decision now the source of considerable legal jeopardy.In light of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago on 8 August, some observers have questioned whether Haberman should have reported Trump’s admission immediately or even alerted the Department of Justice.Most of Haberman’s reporting, however, has been greeted with familiar glee, not least the opening salvo of her pre-publication campaign: a picture of presidential documents torn up and put down a toilet.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsUS press and publishingNew York TimesNewspapersnewsReuse this content More

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      Meadows was central to hundreds of texts about overturning 2020 election, book says

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      Meadows was central to hundreds of texts about overturning 2020 election, book saysMessages include group chat among cabinet officials and plans by lawmakers to object to election certification Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff, was at the center of hundreds of incoming messages about ways to aid Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to texts he turned over to the House January 6 select committee that have been published in a new book.The texts included previously unreported messages, including a group chat with Trump administration cabinet officials and plans to object to Joe Biden’s election certification on January 6 by Republican members of Congress and one former US attorney, as well as other Trump allies.The book, The Breach, was obtained by the Guardian in advance of its scheduled publication on Tuesday. Written by the former Republican congressman and senior adviser to the investigation Denver Riggleman, the work has already become controversial after being condemned by the panel as “unauthorized”.Though most of the texts sent to and from Meadows that Riggleman includes have been public for months, the book offers new insight and fills some gaps about how all three branches of government were seemingly involved in strategizing ways to obstruct the congressional certification on January 6.Less than an hour after the election was called for Biden, for instance, Rick Perry, Trump’s former energy secretary, texted a group chat that included Meadows; the housing secretary, Ben Carson; and the agriculture secretary, Sonny Perdue, that Trump should dispute the call.“POTUS line should be: Biden says hes [sic] president. America will see what big data says,” Perry wrote. “This sets the stage for what we’re about to prove.” While Carson was more cautious, Perdue appeared unconcerned about seeing concrete proof of election fraud. “No quit!” he wrote.White House switchboard called phone linked to January 6 rioter after attackRead moreThe former president’s final White House chief of staff also fielded a text from the Republican senator Kevin Cramer, who forwarded a note from North Dakota’s then US attorney, Drew Wrigley, who offered his own advice for overturning the results because “Trump’s legal team has made a joke of this whole thing”.“Demand state wide recount of absentee/mail-in ballots in line with pre-existing state law with regard to signature comparisons,” Wrigley wrote. “If state officials refuse that recount, the legislature would then act under the constitution, selecting the slate of electors.”The suggestion from Wrigley echoed what the Trump legal team would ultimately pursue in having fake electors sent to Congress on January 6 to have the then vice-president, Mike Pence, refuse to certify Biden’s win – a scheme now part of a criminal investigation by the US attorney in Washington DC.The text from Wrigley is significant since the justice department is supposed to remain above the political fray. Wrigley’s note appears to mark an instance of a federal prosecutor endorsing a legally dubious scheme when there was no fraud sufficient to alter the outcome of the 2020 election.A justice department spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment. Wrigley, now the North Dakota state attorney general, also could not be immediately reached for comment.Texts to Meadows also show Republican lawmakers started to finalize objections to the certification of the 2020 election only hours after Trump sent a tweet about a “big protest” that the House January 6 committee has said mobilized far-right groups to make preparations to storm the Capitol.The former president sent the pivotal tweet in the early hours of 19 December 2020. The panel previously described it as the catalyst that triggered the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers groups, as well as “Stop the Steal” activists, to target obstructing the certification.But the tweet also coincided with efforts by Republican lawmakers to finalize objections to the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election win, new texts from some of Trump’s most ardent supporters on Capitol Hill sent to Meadows show.Hours after Trump sent his tweet, according to texts published in the book, the Republican congressman Jody Hice messaged Meadows to say he would be “leading” his state’s “electoral college objection on Jan 6” – days before Trump is known to have met with Republicans at the White House to discuss it.The congressman also told Meadows that Trump “spoke” with Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Republican who had been elected to a House seat in Georgia but had yet to be sworn in, and was interested in meeting with the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus.Hice’s messages to Meadows came at a critical juncture: it was the Saturday after a contentious Friday meeting at the White House, where Trump entertained seizing voting machines and installing a conspiracy theorist lawyer, Sidney Powell, as special counsel to investigate election fraud.The meeting to discuss objecting to Biden’s win on January 6 was originally scheduled for the next Monday, 21 December 2020, but it was rescheduled to take place on the next Tuesday, according to the book, citing additional messages sent by the Republican congressman Brian Babin.Nine days after the meeting with Trump, the Republican members of Congress seemed to finish their objection plans, and Babin texted Meadows to say the “objectors” would be having an additional strategy session at the Conservative Partnership Institute, which played host to other January 6 efforts.The timing of the new texts to Meadows raised the prospect that Trump’s tweet moved ahead several plans that worked in concert, with the Republican objections about supposed fraud giving Pence a pretext to throw out Biden votes as rioters obstructed proceedings.TopicsTrump administrationDonald TrumpUS elections 2020US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Taking Back Trump’s America review: Peter Navarro’s venomous Maga saga

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      Taking Back Trump’s America review: Peter Navarro’s venomous Maga sagaSeeking to raise money to fight contempt of Congress charges, the former trade adviser shows contempt for his rivals Peter Navarro’s new book won’t win him many new friends. For just one example of the former Trump trade adviser’s frequently, uh, pungent turns of phrase, he compares Jared Kushner to human excrement.The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against AmericaRead moreNor does his disdain for the aspirant dauphin end there. Kushner, Navarro writes, is “nothing if more than a young and rich, run-of-the-mill liberal New York Democrat-cum-slum lord”.In November, Navarro will go on trial for contempt of Congress. He refused to cooperate with the January 6 committee. If convicted, he faces up to two years in prison. On that note, his new book is both a not-so-subtle jab at the Department of Justice under Merrick Garland and a vehicle for crowdsourcing his criminal defense.“Help finance legal effort AND put Trump back in” the White House, Navarro tweeted in June. “Order Taking Back Trump’s America today.” This month, he passed the plate again: “Buy the book today! We need our country back from these stooges and oppressors.”Pro-Trump Trump books, however, are often full of inadvertent self-owns. Thanks to the work of other authors, we know Trump didn’t like aides who took notes, once berating Donald McGahn, his White House counsel, for such a misstep. And yet here comes Navarro, eager to tell the reader he kept lots of notes himself.Page 240 contains a 25 June 2020 journal entry about a meeting of major donors who wanted “Kushner and Brad Parscale out the door” of the Trump campaign. Trump agreed but, Navarro writes, didn’t want to sack his son-in-law himself. One of the donors tried to do it – and failed.Showing his notes, Navarro adds to a pile of evidence that Trump, the supposedly ruthless titan who fired people on TV, actually doesn’t dare fire people. Whoops. Just as well the boss doesn’t read.On the one hand, Taking Back Trump’s America is a hurriedly written laundry list of Navarro’s many grievances. On the other hand, it is rollicking and filled with venom.Navarro has substance, holding a Harvard PhD in economics and having taught at UC Irvine. But intellectual firepower should not be conflated with prudence or restraint. In the past, Navarro has liberally quoted a China expert who turned out not to exist, other than as an anagram of Navarro’s own name.Between 1992 and 2001, Navarro mounted five campaigns for public office – each one unsuccessful. As a candidate, he derided Republicans for being wedded to “every man for himself” and argued that America “ought to progressively tax the rich to help everybody else”. Time passed. Positions shifted.But Navarro is still a bomb-thrower. In his new book, Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary, Gary Cohn, Trump’s first economic adviser, and Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff, all get it in the neck.Navarro recalls an argument in the Oval Office with Mnuchin over China policy. The words “Neville Chamberlain” and “Nazis” appear. Mnuchin is Jewish.Navarro quotes himself: “Hey, Neville, knowing what you know about what the Nazis did to the Jews, how is it that you don’t give a flying puck” – bowdlerization the author’s own – “about what the Chinese communists are doing to two million Uyghurs in the concentration camps of Xinjiang Province … What do you say about that, Stevie?”What does Navarro say about Trump’s adoration for Robert E Lee, Trump’s both-sides-ism over the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville or even Trump reportedly having kept Hitler’s speeches on his nightstand? Nothing.Navarro also advises us that his “favorite Roger Ailes quote” is “Truth is whatever people believe”. As Navarro’s book comes out, Fox News is being sued for billions, for hyping nonsense about voting machines and election interference. Elsewhere, even Trump’s lawyers are lawyering up.Back to Kushner. Purportedly, Navarro came to Trumpworld via the boss’s son-in-law. If so, he demonstrates a marked gratitude deficit. He has even suggested Kushner faked a cancer diagnosis to help sell his own memoir, Breaking History.“That thyroid thing, that came out of nowhere,” Navarro shared. “I saw the guy every day. There’s no sign that he was in any pain or danger or whatever. I think it’s just sympathy to try to sell his book now.”Navarro’s renderings of Trump White House politics do make for engrossing reading. He writes that Kushner told him he wanted to “crush [Steve] Bannon like a bug” – and that Trump resented Bannon, his former campaign manager and White House strategist, for taking “too much credit for the 2016 win”.And yet, when writing about that abortive coup against Kushner during the 2020 campaign, Navarro says the plotters wanted to replace Kushner with … yes, you guessed it, Bannon.Navarro chooses not to examine the fact that had the coup succeeded, the campaign would have confronted a different set of problems. In August 2020, Bannon was arrested and charged with fraud. He denied it, took a pardon from Trump and now faces similar charges in New York state. He has pleaded not guilty again.Servants of the Damned review: Trump and the giant law firm he actually paidRead moreLegal jeopardy is in Trumpworld’s DNA. Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer during the Russia investigation, points out that it comes from the top down.Speaking after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, seeking confidential documents, Cobb said: “I think the president is in serious legal water, not so much because of the search, but because of the obstructive activity he took in connection with the January 6 proceeding. That was the first time in American history that a president unconstitutionally attempted to remain in power illegally.”Navarro can inveigh against Garland and the DoJ all he wants. His book does not alter a fundamental reality. His trial is set for 17 November – just in time for Thanksgiving.
      Taking Back Trump’s America: Why We Lost the White House and How We’ll Win It Back, is published in the US by Post Hill Press
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      Iran president rules out meeting with Biden, saying it won’t be beneficial

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      Iran president rules out meeting with Biden, saying it won’t be beneficialEbrahim Raisi says he sees no ‘changes in reality’ from Trump administration as hopes to revive nuclear talks dampen Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, has ruled out a meeting with Joe Biden on the margins of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) this week, saying he saw no “changes in reality” from the Trump administration.Raisi underlined the firm position of his government and dampened hopes that a week of summitry at UNGA in New York might yield any progress in negotiations to revive the 2015 nuclear deal. Washington has rejected the latest Iranian bargaining positive as “not constructive”, and most observers believe there will be no breakthroughs at least until after the US congressional elections in November.Asked on the CBS 60 Minutes news programme whenever he would be ready to meet Biden in New York, Raisi replied: “No. I don’t think that such a meeting would happen. I don’t believe having a meeting or a talk with him will be beneficial.”Raisi and Biden are both expected to address UNGA on Wednesday morning.On comparisons between the Biden administration, which has reentered talks on restoring the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Programme of Action (JCPOA) and the Trump White House, which withdrew the US from the deal in 2018, triggering its subsequent unraveling, Raisi was blunt.“The new administration in the US, they claim that they are different from the Trump’s administration. They have said it in their messages to us. But we haven’t witnessed any changes in reality,” he said, in an interview due to be broadcast on Sunday evening.Efforts to restore the JCPOA, by which Iran severely restricted its nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief, have stalled in part because Iran is seeking guarantees that any agreement is not reversed by Biden’s successor, which could be Trump himself.Raisi will arrive in New York in a week the regime’s human rights record is under particular scrutiny. Thirty Iranians have been injured, some seriously, in protests after the death of Mahsa Amini a 22-year-old Kurdish woman three days after she was arrested and reportedly beaten by morality police in Tehran.TopicsIranUS foreign policyMiddle East and north AfricaUS politicsJoe BidenBiden administrationTrump administrationnewsReuse this content More

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      Servants of the Damned review: Trump and the giant law firm he actually paid

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      Servants of the Damned review: Trump and the giant law firm he actually paidDavid Enrich delivers a withering study of how big law got into bed with the 45th president – Jones Day in particular Donald Trump stiffed his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to the tune of $2.5m. He refused to grant him a pardon. The former New York City mayor is a target of prosecutors in Fulton county, Georgia. Then again, as David Enrich of the New York Times writes in his new book, by the time Trump entered politics his “reputation for shortchanging his lawyers (and banks and contractors and customers) was well known”. Giuliani can’t say he wasn’t warned.The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against AmericaRead moreIn Servants of the Damned, Enrich also recounts how Trump once attempted to settle a bill for nearly $2m.“This isn’t the 1800s … You can’t pay me with a horse,” the unnamed lawyer replied.Trump eventually coughed up. It was that or another lawsuit.Enrich is the Times’ investigative editor. Dark Towers, his previous book, examined Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank. It also laid out the ties that bound Anthony Kennedy, the retired supreme court justice, to the Trump family. Kennedy’s son once worked at the bank. Brett Kavanaugh, who replaced Kennedy on the court, once clerked for the judge.Servants of the Damned is informative and disturbing. In an unflattering portrait of the rise of big law, behemoth firms that reach around the globe, Enrich homes in on Jones Day. He tags other powerhouses – Paul Weiss, Skadden Arps and Baker McKenzie – for moral failures but repeatedly returns his gaze to the Cleveland-based Jones Day. It represented Trump.Whether the intensity of Enrich’s disdain is deserved is debatable. The public holds lawyers in lower esteem than auto mechanics, nursing home operators, bankers and local politicians. On the other hand, lawyers fare better than reporters. Beyond that, the bar’s canons demand that lawyers zealously represent their clients. Reputational concern and the ease or difficulty of recruiting fresh talent and clients are often more potent restraints than finger-wagging.Beginning in 2015, Jones Day was the Trump campaign’s outside counsel – which Enrich treats as an indelible stain. Almost six years later, he writes, the roof of Jones Day’s Washington office provided “a splendid view of a violent mob storming the Capitol”.The insurrection, Enrich says, was the “predictable culmination of a president whom Jones Day had helped elect, an administration the firm’s lawyers had helped run, and an election whose integrity the firm had helped erode”.Jones Day was not Trump’s post-election counsel, but Enrich assigns culpability. In the aftermath of the 2020 vote, one Trump White House insider lamented to the Guardian that Jones Day wrongly distanced itself from Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat. The campaign paid Jones Day millions. Gratitude and support, the insider said, were in order.Jones Day lawyers marbled the administration. Don McGahn, a partner and a pillar of the conservative bar, was Trump’s first White House counsel. Trump made Noel Francisco solicitor general. Eric Dreiband led the civil rights division at the Department of Justice. All three are back at Jones Day. The revolving door is real.McGahn played a critical role in filling the federal bench with conservative judges who had Federalist Society approval. He presided over a revolution, of sorts. Roe v Wade, the supreme court ruling that guaranteed the right to abortion, lies in tatters.But when McGahn refused to cross the proverbial line during the Russia investigation, Trump soured on him. McGahn made and kept notes – to Trump’s consternation. McGahn quit in fall 2018. The following spring, Trump tweeted: “McGahn had a much better chance of being fired than [Robert] Mueller. Never a big fan!”Enrich also sheds light on the unrest Trump caused within Jones Day, particularly among lawyers who identified as mainstream Republicans. In 2014, Ben Ginsberg and McGahn arrived from another DC law firm. Ginsberg possessed sterling GOP credentials. He had worked at the apex of George W Bush and Mitt Romney’s White House campaigns. Enrich describes his office as “a shrine to the old Republican party”.But in the 2020 cycle, Ginsberg grew discomforted by the direction of Trump’s re-election bid. He called the president’s rhetoric “beyond the pale”. In late August, he resigned. Days later, he wrote a brutal column in the Washington Post, attacking Trump for pushing the lie of widespread election fraud and rubbishing mail-in voting.“The president’s rhetoric,” he said, “has put my party in the position of a firefighter who deliberately sets fires to look like a hero putting them out.” Republicans “risk harming the fundamental principle of our democracy: that all eligible voters must be allowed to cast their ballots. If that happens, Americans will deservedly render the GOP a minority party for a long, long time.”Days before the election, Ginsberg warned that his party was “destroying itself on the altar of Trump”.Holding the Line review: Geoffrey Berman blasts Barr and dumps TrumpRead moreThen there was Donald Ayer, deputy solicitor general in the Reagan administration and deputy attorney general under George HW Bush. After a clash with Dick Thornburgh, then attorney general, Ayer resigned. Bill Barr was his replacement. Ayer returned to Jones Day. In fall 2016, Ayer publicly voiced his opposition to Trump. In 2018, he retired. Before Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, Ayer told Enrich Jones Day “should have gotten off the wagon, because [Trump] is a scoundrel”.But in 2020, according to Open Secrets, the firm netted more than $19.2m in reported federal campaign spending. Trump was a golden ticket.Jones Day has emerged as a “go-to firm for Republicans, mainstream and fringe alike”, as Enrich puts it. With sneakers, vodka and computers, branding matters. Law firms are a little different. Through that lens, Servants of the Damned is as much a rebuke of one large firm as it is an indictment of Trump’s Republican party.
      Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice is published in the US by HarperCollins
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      Trump: US justice department appeals judge’s Mar-a-Lago investigation hold

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      Trump: US justice department appeals judge’s Mar-a-Lago investigation holdDoJ seeks to continue reviewing a batch of classified documents seized during an FBI search of Donald Trump’s Florida home The justice department asked a federal appeals court on Friday to lift a judge’s order that temporarily barred it from reviewing a batch of classified documents seized during an FBI search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida home last month.The department told the 11th circuit US court of appeals in Atlanta that the judge’s hold, imposed last week, had impeded the “government’s efforts to protect the nation’s security” and interfered with its investigation into the presence of top-secret information at Mar-a-Lago. It asked the court to remove that order so work could resume, and to halt a judge’s directive forcing the department to provide the seized classified documents to an independent arbiter for his review.Special master in Trump documents case described as fair and no-nonsenseRead more“The government and the public would suffer irreparable harm absent a stay” of the order, department lawyers wrote in their brief to the appeals court.US district judge Aileen Cannon’s appointment of a so-called special master to review the documents, and the resulting legal tussle it has caused, appear certain to slow by weeks the department’s investigation into the holding of classified documents at the Florida property after Trump left office. The justice department has been investigating possible violations of multiple statutes, including under the Espionage Act, but it remains unclear whether Trump, who has been laying the groundwork for a potential presidential run, or anyone else might be charged.The FBI says it took about 11,000 documents, including roughly 100 with classification markings found in a storage room and an office, while serving a court-authorized search warrant at the home on 8 August. Weeks after the search, Trump lawyers asked a judge to appoint a special master to conduct an independent review of the records.Cannon granted the request last week, assigning a special master to review the records and weed out any that may be covered by claims of attorney-client or executive privilege. She directed the department to halt its use of the classified documents for investigative purposes until further court order, or until the completion of the special master‘s work.On Thursday night, she assigned Raymond Dearie, the former chief judge of the federal court based in Brooklyn, to serve in the role. She also declined to lift her earlier order, citing ongoing disputes about the nature of the documents that she said merited a neutral review by an outside arbiter.“The Court does not find it appropriate to accept the Government’s conclusions on these important and disputed issues without further review by a neutral third party in an expedited and orderly fashion,” she wrote.The justice department on Friday night told the appeals court that Cannon’s injunction “unduly interferes with the criminal investigation”, prohibiting investigators from “accessing the seized records to evaluate whether charges are appropriate”. It also prevents the FBI from using the seized records in its criminal investigation to determine which documents, if any, were disclosed and to whom, the department said.Though Cannon has said investigators are free to do other investigative work that did not involve a review of the documents, the department said on Friday that that was largely impractical. Noting the discovery of dozens of empty folders at Mar-a-Lago marked classified, it said the judge’s hold appeared to bar it from “further reviewing the records to discern any patterns in the types of records that were retained, which could lead to identification of other records still missing”.The department also asked the appeals court to reject Cannon’s order that it provide the newly appointed special master with the classified documents, suggesting there was no reason for the arbiter to review highly sensitive records that did not involve questions of legal privilege.“Plaintiff has no claim for the return of those records, which belong to the government and were seized in a court-authorized search,” department lawyers wrote. “The records are not subject to any possible claim of personal attorney-client privilege. And neither Plaintiff nor the court has cited any authority suggesting that a former President could successfully invoke executive privilege to prevent the Executive Branch from reviewing its own records.”Cannon has directed Dearie to complete his work by 30 November and to prioritize the review of the classified documents. She directed the justice department to permit the Trump legal team to inspect the seized classified records with “controlled access conditions” something government lawyers said on Friday was needless and harmful.On Friday, Dearie, a former federal prosecutor, scheduled a preliminary conference with Trump lawyers and justice department lawyers for Tuesday afternoon.TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsTrump administrationFBIMar-a-LagonewsReuse this content More

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      The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against America

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      The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against America Peter Baker and Susan Glasser offer a beautifully written, utterly dispiriting history of the man who attacked democracyThe US labors in Donald Trump’s shadow, the Republican party “reborn in his image”, to quote Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. Trump is out of office but not out of sight or mind. Determined to explain “what happened” on 6 January 2021, when Trump supporters attacked the Capitol, the husband-and-wife team examines his term in the White House and its chaotic aftermath. Their narrative is riveting, their observations dispiriting.Trump chief of staff used book on president’s mental health as guideRead moreThe US is still counted as a liberal democracy but is poised to stumble out of that state. The stench of autocratization wafts. Maga-world demanded a Caesar. It came close to realizing its dream.In electing Trump, Baker and Glasser write, the US empowered a leader who “attacked basic principles of constitutional democracy at home” and “venerated” strongmen abroad. Whether the system winds up in the “morgue” and how much time remains to make sure it doesn’t are the authors’ open questions.Trump spoke kindly of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un. He treated Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine as a plaything, to be blackmailed for personal gain.In a moment of pique, Trump sought to give the Israeli-controlled West Bank to King Abdullah of Jordan. For Benjamin Netanyahu, the former and possibly future prime minister of Israel, he had a tart “fuck him”.At home, the US is mired in a cold civil war. Half the country deems Trump unfit to hold office, half would grant him a second term, possibly as president for life. Trump’s “big lie”, that the 2020 election was stolen, is potent.The tectonics of education, religion and race clang loudly – and occasionally violently. The insurrection stands as bloody testament to populism and Christian nationalism. The cross and the noose are icons. The Confederacy has risen.Baker is the New York Times’s chief White House correspondent. Glasser works for the New Yorker and CNN. Their book is meticulously researched and beautifully written. Those who were in and around the West Wing talk and share documents. Baker and Glasser lay out receipts. They conducted more than 300 interviews. They met Trump at Mar-a-Lago, “his rococo palace by the sea”, to which we now know he took more than 300 classified documents.“When we sat down with [him] a year after his defeat,” Baker and Glasser write, “the first thing he told us was a lie.”Imagine that.Trump falsely claimed the Biden administration had asked him to record a public service announcement promoting Covid vaccinations. Eventually, he forgot he had spun that yarn. It never happened.Baker and Glasser depict a tempestuous president and a storm-filled presidency. Trump’s time behind the Resolute Desk translated into “fits of rage, late-night Twitter storms, abrupt dismissals”. The authors now compare Trump to Napoleon, exiled to Elba.Congress impeached him twice. He never won the popular vote. His legitimacy flowed from the electoral college, the biggest quirk in the constitution, a document he readily and repeatedly defiled. Tradition and norms counted little. The military came to understand that Trump was bent on staging a coup. The guardrails nearly failed.The führer was a role-model. Trump loudly complained to John Kelly, his second chief of staff, a retired Marine Corps general and a father bereaved in the 9/11 wars: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”“Which generals?”“The German generals in world war II.”“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?”It’s fair to say Trump probably did not know that. He dodged the Vietnam draft, suffering from “bone spurs”, with better things to do. He is … not a reader.In Trump’s White House, Baker and Glasser write, Kelly used The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a study by 27 mental health professionals, as some sort of owner’s manual.A week before Christmas 2020, Trump met another retired general, the freshly pardoned Michael Flynn, and other election-deniers including Patrick Byrne, once a boyfriend of Maria Butina, a convicted Russian agent. Hours later, past midnight, Trump tweeted “Big protest in DC on January 6th … Be there, will be wild!”In that moment, the fears of Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who saw the coup coming, “no longer seemed far-fetched”. Now, as new midterm elections approach, Republicans signal that they will grill Milley if they retake the House.Baker and Glasser also write of how Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump sought refuge from the Trumpian storm, despite being his senior advisers. They endeavored to keep their hands clean but the muck cascaded downward.Not everyone shared their discomfort. Donald Trump Jr proposed “ways to annul the will of the voters”. Rick Perry, the energy secretary, pushed for Republican state legislatures to declare Trump the winner regardless of reality.“HERE’s an AGGRESSIVE STRATEGY,” a Perry text message read.Trump’s increasing tirade against FBI and DoJ endangering lives of officialsRead moreIn such a rogues’ gallery, even the wife of a sitting supreme court justice, Ginni Thomas, stood ready to help. Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff, was a child who yearned for his parent’s affection. He would say and do anything. And yet he managed to spill the beans on Trump testing positive for Covid before debating Biden. Trump called Meadows “fucking stupid”. Meadows has since complied with subpoenas issued by the Department of Justice and the January 6 committee.Baker and Glasser conclude by noting Trump’s advanced age and looking at “would-be Trumps” who might pick up the torch. They name Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley and Tucker Carlson.On Thursday, Trump threatened violence if he is criminally charged.“I think you’d have problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before,” he said. “I don’t think the people of the US would stand for it.”As Timbuk 3 once sang, with grim irony: “The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.”
      The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 is published in the US by Penguin Random House
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      Bannon is not finished: his ‘precinct strategy’ could alter US elections for years

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      AnalysisBannon is not finished: his ‘precinct strategy’ could alter US elections for yearsChris McGrealOne longtime Bannon watcher says it’s too early to count him out – even a prison term could enhance his status among the Maga crowd When Steve Bannon heard that he was, after all, going to face charges last week for allegedly ripping off contributors to a multimillion-dollar fund to build a wall on the Mexican border, he claimed it was a sign of his success.Donald Trump’s former strategist said his arrest on Thursday was an attempt to shut down his War Room pod and video cast because it is driving grassroots support for the former president’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement and reshaping the Republican party ahead of the midterm elections.“They are coming after all of us, not only President Trump and myself. I am never going to stop fighting,” he said.That much was apparent from Bannon’s final broadcast before his arrest as he let loose against the Biden “regime” and “social media oligarchs” he accused of conspiring to fix elections for the Democrats. For Bannon, the endless war is between “people in our posse” and Joe Biden’s “global attack on Maga”.The audience for this daily assault on reality is not as large as it once was. YouTube blocked the War Room two days after the storming of the Capitol in January 2021 for falsely claiming the presidential election was stolen. Exact numbers of listeners are hard to come by but the programme has been downloaded millions of times and still regularly appears in the top 50 most listened to podcasts in the US, at times reaching No 2 in Apple podcasts about American politics.From there, the War Room appears to be having an impact far beyond the sight of most Americans, as Bannon pushes a strategy for Maga supporters to infiltrate the Republican party before the midterms and 2024 presidential election.But now the 68-year-old architect of Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory, and briefly a White House aide, could be stopped in his tracks by his legal problems. Bannon already has a conviction for contempt of Congress under his belt for refusing to testify over his role in the attack on the Capitol that could send him to jail for months when he is sentenced in October.The latest charges put the white nationalist back on the hook for alleged crimes for which he was pardoned by Trump in the last hours of his presidency. That pardon covered only federal crimes and New York state has waded in to accuse Bannon of stealing $1m from donations to the We Build The Wall campaign to help construct an anti-migrant barrier on the US border with Mexico. Two other men have already pleaded guilty in connection with the alleged fraud and face lengthy prison sentences.Madeline Peltz, who has followed Bannon’s broadcasts for the past two years for Media Matters, which monitors conservative and far-right commentators, said that for all his problems, it would be a mistake to write off the populist agitator.“The big picture shows that you can never really count out Steve Bannon, both because of the trajectory of his career as well as the status of the movement in which he is a prominent figure,” she said.Bannon has maintained that status by keeping the myth of the stolen 2020 presidential election front and centre in his broadcasts as key to engineering Trump’s comeback if he runs again in two years.But Bannon’s most important role at present may be his championing of what is known as the “precinct strategy”, which seeks to take control of the Republican party from the bottom up, getting Trump supporters to take low-ranking, often vacant, positions within local branches. They are then in a position to select more senior party officials and to influence decisions such as the staffing of elections and selection of candidates, and ultimately to move up the party ranks.Maga activists are also targeting school boards and poll monitoring positions.“We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct,” Bannon said in one of his shows pushing the strategy.ProPublica contacted dozens of Republican party county leaders across the US who reported significant increases in membership applications that appear tied to the precinct strategy.Peltz said that the consequences could be with America for years.“If Bannon is successful in shoehorning grassroots activists, which it appears that he is, he could have loyalists controlling the levels of power within the Republican party and, even more concerning, in election administration. That could be almost impossible to unwind for years and decades to come,” she said.For all that, Bannon faces challenges.As he sought to remain politically relevant after a brief and turbulent stint as a White House aide at the beginning of Trump’s presidency, Bannon launched a far-right group in Europe, the Movement, that rapidly failed.He also fell out badly with Trump, with the president saying that his former strategist had “lost his mind” after Bannon was quoted as describing a meeting between one of the president’s sons and a group of Russians as “treasonous”. Bannon backed off but the damage was done and it cost him his position running the far-right Breitbart News after a major financial backer withdrew support over the Trump comments.Bannon reingratiated himself in part by launching the War Room from a Washington townhouse three years ago to campaign against Trump’s impeachment. Within a few months, it evolved into War Room: Pandemic to exploit uncertainty and fear about the spread of coronavirus. Eventually, it broadened as a platform for Bannon’s rants about whatever was frustrating him.Bannon’s influence is not without its limits. Most of the candidates he backed in the 2022 Republican primaries lost. Peltz said that he is also financially vulnerable.“A big weakness is that he’s super desperate for money. His billionaire benefactor, Gou Wengui, declared bankruptcy. Since then the whole show has turned into a big rightwing direct-to-consumer ad for a variety of scammy projects, including gold, MyPillow, satellite cellphones, prepper supplies. That’s a sign that he’s not in a good position,” she said.Then there is the prospect of prison. He would not be able to broadcast the War Room from his cell, although others might hold the fort if he was serving a relatively short spell in jail. A longer prison sentence of several years, which is quite possible if he is convicted on the fraud charges, would be a different matter.Still, Peltz said that a prison sentence could bolster Bannon’s credibility on the right. “He ultimately will be a bigger hero among the Maga crowd than ever, and I think that his sort of profile in American politics could take off from there,” she said.TopicsSteve BannonTrump administrationUS politicsRepublicansanalysisReuse this content More