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      Donald Trump believes in clemency and mercy. But only for his friends and family | Jill Filipovic

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      Given that Donald Trump treats the office of the presidency like a personal branding tool, and deals with adversity like a two-bit mafioso, this moment was perhaps predictable: the president is reportedly considering pre-emptively pardoning three of his children, his son-in-law, and associates including Rudy Giuliani. He has already pardoned or commuted the sentences of several of his friends and associates, which should raise some eyebrows – why do so many people who surround this president wind up charged with a crime, in jail, or bracing themselves for criminal charges? And why is the supposedly law-and-order “pro-life” Republican party shrugging as this president excuses the criminality of his kin and his cronies while he refuses to intervene to save anyone from execution – and in fact, is using what little time he has left in office to reinstate barbaric practices like death by firing squad?We all know Trump didn’t drain the swamp. But in his last two months in office, he is sending a clear message about who and what he and his party value. It’s not Christian mercy, or hard-nosed law and order, or even the sanctity of life. It’s power, dominance and a thick line between two Americas: one connected, white, power-hungry and lawless, and the other at its mercy.As Trump’s term winds down, the White House is reportedly besieged with requests from lackeys and sycophants and hangers-on and D-list celebrities who all believe the president may grant them a get-out-of-jail-free card (or, in the case of his children and Giuliani, who have not been charged or convicted of any crimes, a get-out-of-ever-being-held-accountable card). Even the Tiger King has made his case to the president.Many expect that the president will issue a flurry of pardons and commutations, and this largesse will be bestowed much like the measly 11 pardons and commutations he’s issued so far: on people who worked for him, people who supported him, people could incriminate him and people who personally impress him (sometimes via reality television stars, because we are living in the worst of times).Trump has refused to use his powers for good, and has been appalling harsh on those who have been over-sentencedHe’s granted clemency almost entirely to his friends, advisers, supporters and loyalists, with a few war criminals and conservative cultural icons thrown in for good measure. The only people he has used his pardon power to help who fall outside that characterization are either famous but long-dead historical figures and Alice Marie Johnson, who was serving a life sentence for a non-violent drug offense – and whose case he only learned about because reality television star Kim Kardashian West brought it to his desk.What he largely hasn’t done is use the presidential clemency power for its highest purpose: to correct serious injustice and act with compassion.Despite touting himself as a president who has done more for criminal justice reform than any other, the opposite is actually true: Trump has refused to use his powers for good, and has been appalling harsh on those who have been over-sentenced. Several people on federal death row have appealed to the president for clemency – not to go home, just to not be killed by the state. So far, Trump has ignored them. The list of those who are still alive includes Brandon Bernard, who was just 18 when he joined a group of friends for what he thought was going to be a carjacking and a robbery; one of his friends ended up murdering the couple the group robbed, in a brutal act Bernard had not foreseen and was horrified by. At trial, Bernard’s lawyer, who had never argued a federal death penalty case before, barely mounted a defense and failed to call important witnesses. Several members of the jury that convicted him now say that he should not be executed. And there’s Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row, who committed an awful crime – she murdered a pregnant woman and stole her baby – but also has a severe and debilitating mental illness, and, her lawyers say, was psychotic when she committed that heinous crime. More

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      Ivanka Trump quizzed as part of inauguration fund lawsuit

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      Ivanka Trump was interviewed by attorneys alleging that Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration committee misused donor funds, a new court filing reveals.The document, first reported by CNN on Wednesday, shows that Ivanka Trump, the president’s oldest daughter and a senior White House adviser, was interviewed on Tuesday by attorneys from the Washington, DC, attorney general’s office.The office has filed a lawsuit alleging waste of the nonprofit’s funds, accusing the committee of making more than $1m (£746,000) in improper payments to the president’s Washington, DC, hotel during the week of the inauguration in 2017.As part of the suit, they have subpoenaed records from Ivanka Trump; the first lady, Melania Trump; Thomas Barrack Jr, a close friend of the president who chaired the inaugural committee, and others. Barrack was also interviewed last month.Trump’s inaugural committee spent more than $1m to book a ballroom at the Trump International Hotel in the nation’s capital as part of a scheme to “grossly overpay” for party space and enrich the president’s own family in the process, the District of Columbia’s attorney general, Karl Racine, alleges.He has accused the committee of misusing nonprofit funds and coordinating with the hotel’s management and members of the Trump family to arrange the events.“District law requires nonprofits to use their funds for their stated public purpose, not to benefit private individuals or companies,” Racine has said. “In this case, we are seeking to recover the nonprofit funds that were improperly funnelled directly to the Trump family business.”The committee raised an unprecedented $107m to host events celebrating Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, but its spending has drawn continued scrutiny.In a statement, Alan Garten, from the Trump Organization, said that “Ms Trump’s only involvement was connecting the parties and instructing the hotel to charge a ‘fair market rate,’ which the hotel did.” More

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      US justice department investigates alleged 'bribery for pardon' scheme at White House

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      An alleged “bribery for pardon” scheme at the White House is under investigation by the justice department, according to a court filing unsealed on Tuesday.
      The heavily redacted document does not name Donald Trump or other individuals and leaves many unanswered questions, but comes amid media reports that the US president is considering sweeping pardons before he leaves office next month.
      It shows that the justice department investigation alleges that an individual offered “a substantial political contribution in exchange for a presidential pardon or reprieve of sentence”.
      Two individuals acted improperly as lobbyists to secure the pardon in the “bribery-for-pardon schemes”, as the document puts it. All three names are blacked out.
      On Tuesday night, a justice department official told Reuters that no US government official is the “subject or target” of investigation into whether money was funnelled to the White House in exchange for a presidential pardon.
      Trump issued a brief response on Tuesday night, resorting to one of his favourite phrases to criticise the media even though the details were contained in official court papers. “Pardon investigation is Fake News!” he tweeted.
      The watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) tweeted in response: “It’s hard to overstate how big a deal the phrase ‘bribery-for-pardon schemes’ is.”
      The document was unsealed by the district court for the District of Columbia, in Washington. Some of its 20 pages are entirely redacted, implying that revealing the details now might jeopardise an ongoing investigation.
      They discuss a review by chief judge Beryl Howell in late August of a request from prosecutors for documents gathered for the bribery investigation. More than 50 digital devices including iPhones, iPads, laptops, thumb drives and computer drives were seized after investigators raided unidentified offices. It was not clear why Howell decided to release the filing now.
      Trump last week pardoned Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser, who had twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Trump and Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer, discussed as recently as last week the possibility of a “pre-emptive pardon”. Giuliani tweeted a denial.
      The court disclosure unleashed a whirlwind of speculation in Washington. The Democrat Adam Schiff, the chair of the House of Representatives’ intelligence committee, told the MSNBC network: “People shouldn’t presume – and there may be a tendency to leap to the – that this may involve some of the personalities that have been very much in the news and are worried about their criminal liability.
      “It may be someone that we’ve never heard of that wants a pardon and is well-heeled and therefore in a position to make a sizeable contribution. So it doesn’t have to be any of the parties that we think that may want a pardon: the [Paul] Manaforts, the Giulianis and others. It could be someone completely different but, at the end of the day, someone in that chain has to be close enough to the White House where they could conceivably deliver on the official act of pardon if the bribe were paid.”
      Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Trump’s legacy is the plague of extreme lies. Truth-based media is the vaccine | Richard Wolffe

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      Normal presidents start to think about their legacy long before the final weeks of their time inside the West Wing. But if there’s anything we have learned from the lab rat experiment of the last four years, it’s that Donald Trump is entirely abnormal.Whether he knows it or not – and all the evidence suggests he knows nothing worth knowing – Trump’s legacy is the toxic politics of lies: a permanent campaign of fabrications and falsehoods.No matter that he clearly lost the 2020 election by landslide margins in the electoral college and the popular vote. What matters is the never-ending sense of grievance that someone or something, somewhere – liberals, minorities, judges, reporters – have conspired to wrong Trump and oppress his long-suffering fans.This is the narrative of the fascist story forever: you are not to blame for your suffering because it was contrived by others – immigrants and outsiders, wielding wealth and power in the shadows.Trump did not invent this story and likely has no idea where it came from, other than his own obvious genius. He did not invent the notion that brazen lies can buy you a delusional base. He wasn’t the first to put the bull in the bully pulpit of the presidency.But he was the first to run a White House like a Joe McCarthy witch hunt, unleashing social media to cower an entire party into a posture of pure cowardice.Trump’s Republicans will be with us long after the soon-to-be-ex-president succumbs to the overdue tax bills of the IRS, the calling-in of his massive property debts, and the long-brewing fraud cases of New York state’s prosecutors.These Trumpist Republicans are his legacy, as much as a supreme court stacked against the popular vote, science and all good sense.They are people like Elise Stefanik in upstate New York. Stefanik is a Harvard graduate whose career began alongside Republican moderates such as Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor, and Josh Bolten, Bush’s second term chief of staff. But now she’s a full Trumpista, mimicking his campaign style of insults and defending him through his impeachment for corruptly twisting national security to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.They are people like Tom Cotton, the Arkansas senator and 2024 presidential hopeful. Cotton is already campaigning against immigrants and says he’ll oppose Biden’s nominee for homeland security because he was part of a giant conspiracy of Democratic donors to sell green cards to the Chinese. In fact the conspiracy involved just three cases, and is the same cash-for-citizenship program that triggered investigations into Trump’s son-in-law and confidant Jared Kushner. But why spoil the soundbite?They are people like Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, who spent most of the 2020 campaign sounding like a Trump clone but has now disappeared from public view, even as he continues to stop local officials from enforcing mask-wearing to slow the spread of the pandemic.Trump’s Republicans will be with us long after the soon-to-be-ex-president succumbs to the overdue tax bills, the massive property debts, and the long-brewing fraud casesThis political plague of extreme lies did not start four years ago.George W Bush and Karl Rove won the 2004 election by suggesting that Democrats would open the nation’s doors to Islamist terrorists. That was before the second term was demolished by their own nativists who sunk their plans for immigration reform. Those anti-immigrant forces found a natural home in the so-called Tea party that denied Barack Obama’s citizenship, and later populated Trump’s White House and justice department.The good news is that we already have a vaccine. It’s the best way to protect yourself from demagogues, deception and delusions. It separates fact from fiction. It recalls recent history to place the present in some kind of meaningful context.It’s called the news media, and you can help. You can be an informed citizen by reading established news media first, not your social feed or email. You can share stories from the truth-tellers who have no problem calling out the liars.You can even pay for the truth that journalists deliver every day, no matter how much sewage pours through social media feeds and email inboxes. It doesn’t cost much when you think about how much we’ve paid during these last four years of chaos and corruption.We can’t stop the Trumpistas from Trumping. We can’t stop the rest of them from pretending like they were never big Trump fans in the first place.But we can stop them running away from the facts or their record. We can remind them how they failed to stop Trump’s corruption and this murderous pandemic.We can stop them skewing the political spectrum so far that the Biden team tacks to center ground that is already six steps to the right.We can hold the new White House to its promises at the same time as holding the old Republican party to what used to be its principles.But this work comes at a price. Back in the late 19th century, the French writer Gustave Le Bon wrote that “the crowd” has never rewarded the truth.“They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them,” he wrote. “Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”You can reward the truth if you want to. It’s one of the best ways to demolish the legacy of the last four years. More

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      in US Politics

      Scott Atlas resigns as Trump pandemic adviser after controversial tenure

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      Scott Atlas has resigned as special adviser to Donald Trump, a White House official said on Monday, after a controversial four months during which he attacked science-based public health measures and clashed repeatedly with other members of the coronavirus taskforce.“I am writing to resign from my position as Special Advisor to the President of the United States,” Atlas said in a letter to Trump dated 1 December, according to Fox News, which first reported his resignation. Atlas later confirmed his resignation in a tweet.Atlas is a neuroradiologist and fellow at Stanford’s rightwing Hoover Institution, where he works on healthcare policy. He has no expertise or experience in infectious diseases or epidemiology, yet was nevertheless selected by Trump to advise the president on the pandemic.Atlas joined the White House this summer, where he clashed with top government scientists, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr Deborah Birx, as he resisted stronger efforts to contain the pandemic.Atlas attacked public health measures such as masks, stay-at-home orders and social distancing. He called on residents of Michigan to “rise up” against restrictions put in place by Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who had been the target of a kidnapping plot, leading to calls for his firing.Atlas repeatedly downplayed the threat of the virus, which has killed more than 265,000 Americans.He also promoted the idea that the US should aim to achieve “herd immunity”, a so-called strategy that would probably result in millions of deaths, and was repeatedly rebuked by public health and infectious disease experts, in addition to Stanford University and the Stanford faculty senate.His views also prompted Stanford to issue a statement distancing itself from the faculty member, saying Atlas “has expressed views that are inconsistent with the university’s approach in response to the pandemic”.“We support using masks, social distancing, and conducting surveillance and diagnostic testing,” the university said on 16 November. “We also believe in the importance of strictly following the guidance of local and state health authorities.”Atlas has been sharply criticized by public health experts, including Fauci, the leading US infectious disease expert, for providing Trump with misleading or incorrect information on the virus pandemic. He has downplayed the importance of face masks and this month said lockdowns had been “an epic failure” in stopping the virus’s spread.Atlas defended his role in his resignation letter, saying, “I cannot think of a time where safeguarding science and the scientific debate is more urgent.”The resignation comes as the country faces a deadly surge in coronavirus cases and record-high hospitalisations. The US is currently reporting more than 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day.Dr Celine Grounder, a member of Biden’s advisory panel on the crisis, greeted the news of the resignation with relief.“I’m relieved that in the future, people who are qualified, people who are infectious disease specialists and epidemiologists like me will be helping to lead this effort,” she told CNBC.“You wouldn’t go to a podiatrist for a heart attack and that was essentially what was happening.”Atlas was hired as a “special government employee”, which limited his service to government to 130 days in a calendar year, a deadline he reached this week. More

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      Kushner heading to Saudi Arabia and Qatar amid tensions over Iranian scientist killing

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      White House senior adviser Jared Kushner is headed to Saudi Arabia and Qatar this week for talks in a region simmering with tension after the killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist.A senior administration official said on Sunday that Kushner is to meet the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in the Saudi city of Neom, and the emir of Qatar in that country in the coming days. Kushner will be joined by Middle East envoys Avi Berkowitz and Brian Hook and Adam Boehler, chief executive of the US International Development Finance Corporation.Kushner and his team helped negotiate normalization deals between Israel and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Sudan since August. The official said they would like to advance more such agreements before Donald Trump hands power to president-elect Joe Biden on 20 January.US officials believe enticing Saudi Arabia into a deal with Israel would prompt other Arab nations to follow suit. But the Saudis do not appear to be on the brink of reaching such a landmark deal and officials in recent weeks have been focusing on other countries, with concern about Iran’s regional influence a uniting factor.Kushner’s trip comes after the killing on Friday of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in Tehran by unidentified assailants. Western and Israeli governments believe Fakhrizadeh was the architect of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program.Days before the killing, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, travelled to Saudi Arabia and met with Prince Mohammed, an Israeli official said, in what was the first publicly confirmed visit by an Israeli leader. Israeli media said they were joined by the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.The historic meeting underlined how opposition to Tehran is bringing about a strategic realignment of countries in the Middle East. Prince Mohammed and Netanyahu fear Biden will adopt policies on Iran similar to those adopted during Barack Obama’s presidency which strained Washington’s ties with its traditional regional allies. Biden has said he will rejoin the international nuclear pact with Iran that Trump quit in 2018 – and work with allies to strengthen its terms – if Tehran first resumes strict compliance.The senior administration official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, declined to give more details of Kushner’s trip for security reasons.The official said Kushner met at the White House last week with the Kuwaiti foreign minister, Sheikh Ahmad Nasser Al-Mohammad Al-Sabah. Kuwait is seen as critical in any effort to resolve a three-year rift between Qatar and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council.Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, which comprise the GCC, cut diplomatic ties with Qatar in 2017 and imposed a boycott over allegations that Qatar supported terrorism, a charge it denies. More

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      Trump rails at judges as another court rejects his lawyers' claims of voter fraud

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      A day after Pennsylvania’s highest court had thrown out a lower court’s order preventing the state from certifying results from the 3 November US elections, Donald Trump blasted the judges’ decision.
      Saturday’s case – which had attempted to throw out 2.5m mail in votes in the crucial state – was the latest of dozens of failed lawsuits by Trump’s lawyers, with judges castigating his lawyers for failing to present evidence of fraud.
      With states certifying results, Trump has an ever dwindling route to contest the election as Joe Biden pushes on with preparations for his inauguration as president on 20 January and recruits the team for his administration.
      However, on Sunday in his first media appearance since losing the presidential contest to his Democratic rival, the president phoned into Fox News to blame the courts for his campaign’s so far unsuccessful legal challenges, which are based on a series of debunked conspiracies alleging widespread voter fraud.
      “We’re not allowed to put in our proof. They say you don’t have standing,” Trump told Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures.
      “We have affidavits, we have hundreds and hundreds of affidavits,” Trump added, noting he’d “file one nice, big beautiful lawsuit” without providing any details on the supposed “tremendous proof” attorneys have.
      In the 20 days since polls closed, Republicans and Trump campaign officials have leaned into claims, without evidence, that some states allowed voters to turn in ballots after election day.
      His interview comes after weeks of legal challenges from the Trump campaign in battleground states including Pennsylvania, where the underlying lawsuit was filed months after the law allowed for challenges to Pennsylvania’s year-old mail-in voting law.
      The defeat on Saturday followed Friday’s decision by a federal appeals court to dismiss a separate challenge to the Pennsylvania result and back a district judge who likened the president’s evidence-free and error-strewn lawsuit to “Frankenstein’s monster”.
      The president’s legal team, led by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, had also demanded recounts in states like Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan, alleging that vote-counting machines were rigged in an elaborate scheme in which even the justice department, FBI and the federal court system were complicit.
      But none of these claims are true. In fact, Trump’s own legal team has never formally challenged elections results in any state court under through substantiated claims of fraud.
      According to the Washington Post, the last-ditch effort has attorneys within the campaign describing – Trump’s legal advisor as increasingly “deranged.” One close adviser told to The Postthat Trump was like “Mad King George” going around the White House ‘muttering, “I won. I won. I won.”
      Meanwhile, Milwaukee county completed its recount and certified its results on Friday, just 10 days after the Trump campaign filed a recount request for there and Dane county, the state’s two Democratic strongholds with large Black populations.
      After nearly 400 uncounted ballots were found, Biden actually increased his margin of victory – gaining an 257 additional votes to the president’s 125 additional votes. Once Dane county certifies its results, the state will move forward in its final certification process.
      In response, Trump tweeted that the recount was not an effort to find mistakes in the tally, but about “finding people who have voted illegally” – again invoking discredited conspiracies that his campaign has “found many illegal votes”.The outgoing president has yet to concede the 2020 election, even as Biden, now president-elect, announces cabinet appointments and his agenda for his first 100 days in office.
      After Biden crossed the 80m-vote threshold – a more than 6m vote lead – Trump demanded Biden prove that the votes he received in the election were not “illegally obtained”, which there is no legal requirement of any winning official to do before taking office.
      There have been a number or reports, based on anonymous official sources, that Trump is weighing up a run in the 2024 presidential election, including a report by the Daily Beast that he is thinking of announcing his campaign during Biden’s inauguration. More

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      Joe Biden gains votes in Wisconsin county after Trump-ordered recount

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      A recount in Wisconsin’s largest county demanded by President Donald Trump’s election campaign ended on Friday with the president-elect, Joe Biden, gaining votes.After the recount in Milwaukee county, Biden made a net gain of 132 votes, out of nearly 460,000 cast. Overall, the Democrat gained 257 votes to Trump’s 125.Trump’s campaign had demanded recounts in two of Wisconsin’s most populous and Democratic-leaning counties, after he lost Wisconsin to Biden by more than 20,000 votes. The two recounts will cost the Trump campaign $3m. Dane county is expected to finish its recount on Sunday.Overall, Biden won November’s US presidential election with 306 electoral college votes to Trump’s 232. Biden also leads by more than 6m in the popular vote tally.After the recount ended, the Milwaukee county clerk, George Christenson, said: “The recount demonstrates what we already know: that elections in Milwaukee county are fair, transparent, accurate and secure.”The Trump campaign is still expected to mount a legal challenge to the overall result in Wisconsin, but time is running out. The state is due to certify its presidential result on Tuesday.On Friday, Trump’s legal team suffered yet another defeat when a federal appeals court in Philadelphia rejected the campaign’s latest effort to challenge the state’s election results.Trump’s lawyers said they would take the case to the supreme court despite the Philadelphia judges’ assessment that the “campaign’s claims have no merit”.Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote for the three-judge panel: “Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”Trump continued to maintain without evidence that there was election fraud in the state, tweeting early on Saturday: “The 1,126,940 votes were created out of thin air. I won Pennsylvania by a lot, perhaps more than anyone will ever know.”Meanwhile, Trump’s baseless claims of electoral fraud in Georgia are increasingly worrying his own party. Republicans are concerned that the chaos caused by Trump’s stance and his false comments on the conduct of the election in the key swing state, which Biden won for the Democrats, could hinder his party’s efforts to retain control of the Senate.A runoff for the state’s two Senate seats is scheduled for early January and if the Democrats clinch both seats, it will give them control of the upper house as well as the House of Representatives.When asked about his previous baseless claims of fraud in Georgia during a Thanksgiving Day press conference, Trump said he was “very worried” about them, saying: “You have a fraudulent system.” He then called the state’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who has defended the state’s election process, an “enemy of the people”.Such attacks have Republicans worried as they seek to motivate Georgia voters to come to the polls in January, volunteer for their Senate campaigns and – perhaps most importantly of all – dig deep into their pockets to pay for the unexpected runoff races.In particular Trump’s comments have spurred conspiracy theories that the state’s electoral system is rigged and prompted some of his supporters to make calls for a boycott of the coming vote – something that local Georgia Republicans desperately do not want. “His demonization of Georgia’s entire electoral system is hurting his party’s chances at keeping the Senate,” warned an article published by Politico.With Reuters and Associated Press More