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      Civil War is a terrifying film, but Trump: The Sequel will be a real-life horror show | Simon Tisdall

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      Director, cast and critics all agree: Civil War, the movie depicting America tearing itself to bloody bits while a cowardly, authoritarian president skulks in the White House, is not about Donald Trump. But it is, really.Likewise, the first ever criminal trial of a US president, now playing to huge audiences in New York, is ostensibly about claims that Trump fraudulently bought the silence of a former porn star called Stormy after a tacky Lake Tahoe tryst. But it isn’t, really.Both movie and trial are about a Trump second term. They’re about sex, lies and Access Hollywood videotape, about trust and betrayal, truth and division. They’re about democracy in America, where political feuds and vendettas swirl, guns proliferate and debates over civil rights are neither civil nor right.Alex Garland’s smash-hit “post-ideological” dystopian nightmare and the Manhattan courthouse peak-time showdown are both ultimately about the same things: the uses and abuses of power, about a nation’s journey to extremes where, as in Moby’s song, it falls apart.Talking of disintegration, what a diminished figure Trump now cuts in court. Slouched, round-shouldered and silenced alongside his lawyers, he acts up, sulky, aggrieved, childishly petulant. The room is cold, he whinges. Potential jurors rudely insult him to his face! It’s all so unfair.Trump never did dignified, not even in the Oval Office. Yet even by his tawdry standards, this daily demeaning before an unbending judge is irretrievably, publicly humiliating. The loss of face and sustaining swagger begin to look terminal. For Trump the alleged criminal conspirator, as opposed to Trump the presidential comeback king, the familiar campaign cry of “Four More Years!” has a disturbing ring. Four years in chokey is what he faces if found guilty on 34 felony charges.It’s no coincidence, so Trump camp followers believe, that Civil War premiered in election year. No surprise, either, that a Democratic district attorney pushed for the trial. Or that latest polling by the “liberal media” suggests Trump is losing ground to Joe Biden.Despite all that, the Make America Great Again screenplay is unchanging. Trump’s blockbuster second march on Washington is merely on pause, Maga-men say. He’s making an epic sequel and he’ll be back in November with all guns blazing – which is the problem, in a nutshell.If you doubt it, just look at Pennsylvania. Even as the defendant, dozy and defiant by turns, snoozed in court and slandered witnesses on social media, this same presumed 2024 Republican champion was effortlessly sweeping last week’s party primary with 83% of the vote.View image in fullscreenThere’s no real-world contradiction here. A grumpy Trump scowling at the bench and a Civil War-like wannabe dictator hot for White House power and glory are united in one unlovely, vicious personage. Two sides of the same bent cent. The list of Trump’s crimes for which he has yet to be tried extends far beyond the New York indictment and the charge sheets in three other pending cases. Like Tom Ripley, the sociopathic narcissist anti-hero of Netflix’s popular TV mini-series, Trump is violently dangerous beyond all knowing.The lethal 6 January insurrection he incited and applauded was stark treason against the republic. No argument. The racist relativism of Charlottesville in 2017 foreshadowed recent, unrepentant talk of “poisoning the blood of our country”. His corrosive words burn like acid through the social fabric. No Civil War paramilitary crazy could wish for more than Trump’s eager feeding of America’s gun addiction, support for domestic execution and assassination overseas, collaboration with murderous dictators, debasement of the supreme court and hostility to open government, free speech and impartial reporting.No Ripley-style conman or fraudster could hope to emulate the master criminal’s arm-twisting of Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden’s son, Hunter, his political protection rackets and shameless nepotism, his suborning of his party, Congress and the legal system or his rich man’s contempt for the ordinary Joe who actually pays taxes.A prospective second Trump term presages obsessive score-settling at home and abject appeasement abroad. Judges, law officers, witnesses, female accusers, military men, diplomats, academics and critical media may be among the early victims of a national revenge tragedy – a personalised purge of the institutions of state that could prove fatal to democracy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s fawning obsequiousness towards Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and vendetta against Kyiv’s leadership, spell disaster for Ukraine. Nor can there be much confidence, for all his bluster, that he would stand up to China should it invade Taiwan.Prepare, too, for a likely European rupture and trade war, a Nato split and an unravelling of 75 years of transatlantic collaboration. Prepare for an out-of-control global arms race, unchecked nuclear weapons proliferation on Earth and in space and the wholesale abandonment of climate crisis goals. A Trump success in November, with all the ensuing chaos, schism and constitutional outrages, would bring closer both an end to peaceful, rational debate within America and the demise of US global leadership.So truly, is Civil War so very far off the mark? Is it really not about Trump and Trumpism? It’s certainly more comforting to frame the movie as an entertainment, to interpret its studied avoidance of direct references to present-day politics as reassurance that, at heart, it’s essentially make-believe. But that denialist view is itself a type of escapism or wishful thinking. It won’t silence the guns.In one untypical, symbolic scene, the war-weary photojournalist played by Kirsten Dunst, all body armour and pursed lips, tries on a pretty dress in a downtown store insulated from the fighting. It is as if she, like America, is trying, fleetingly, to recover her humanity.It’s unclear whether she succeeds. More hopeful moments like that, and a good deal less trumpery, are badly needed now. Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s Foreign Affairs Commentator
      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk More

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      Aaron Sorkin to write film about January 6 and Facebook disinformation

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      Aaron Sorkin is set to write a film about the January 6 insurrection and the involvement of Facebook disinformation.The Social Network screenwriter is returning to similar territory for an as-yet-untitled look at how social media helped radicalise Donald Trump supporters who went onto storm the US Capitol in 2021.“I blame Facebook for January 6,” he said on a special edition of The Town podcast, live from Washington DC. When asked to explain why, he responded: “You’re gonna need to buy a movie ticket.”He then announced that he would be covering the subject in an upcoming project.“Facebook has been, among other things, tuning its algorithm to promote the most divisive material possible,” he said. “Because that is what will increase engagement and because that is what will get you to, what they call inside the hallways of Facebook, the infinite scroll.”When asked whose responsibility that was, he replied: “Mark Zuckerberg.”He continued: “There is supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity, there isn’t. It’s just growth so if Mark Zuckerberg wakes up tomorrow and realises that there is nothing you can buy for $120bn that you can’t buy for $119bn, so how about if I make a little less money, I will tune up integrity and I will tune down growth.”Sorkin said he has yet to have a conversation with the Facebook CEO that isn’t “through the op-ed pages of the New York Times”.The writer-director’s 2010 adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires looked at the origins of the site and the early controversy surrounding it. The script won Sorkin his first Oscar.Sorkin was also asked about why he dropped his agent Maha Dakhil last year after she shared a post online that criticised Israel’s involvement in the ongoing conflict with Palestine which read: “You’re currently learning who supports genocide.”“She posted something on Instagram that I just didn’t understand,” he said before adding: “There were people in my family who would have been hurt if I stayed.”Last year saw Sorkin return to the stage with an adaptation of the musical Camelot, which received five Tony nominations but mixed reviews. His last film was 2021’s Being the Ricardos starring Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem. More

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      The pro-Trump Arizona fake electors scheme: what’s in the charging document?

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      The indictment against the slate of fake electors in Arizona and the Trump allies who advanced the scheme there includes a host of public statements and private exchanges that show how the group intended to overturn the state’s electoral votes for Joe Biden in 2020.Arizona’s Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, announced on Wednesday that a state grand jury charged the 11 false electors and seven others with nine felony counts of fraud, forgery and conspiracy. The indictment from Mayes’s office is sure to be a talking point in this year’s elections, nearly four years after the acts themselves occurred.The case’s net spans more broadly than the slate of fake electors itself, entangling Trump associates who perpetrated the theory that this “alternative” slate could be used by Congress and then vice-president Mike Pence instead of the state’s rightful electors who signed off that Biden won the state.The documents detail the steps taken behind the scenes to push the concept of using electors for Trump to pressure Pence on 6 January 2021. Trump allies, both those charged in Arizona and those who weren’t, were exchanging messages, pressuring elected officials and arranging court cases to benefit the fake electors idea, the indictment shows.And several of the fake electors themselves, by their public statements, intended for their act of signing falsely that they were the state’s true electors to be used by the Trump campaign to disrupt the electoral count and subvert the state’s Biden win.Trump himself is not charged in the Arizona case, though he is listed throughout the indictment as “unindicted co-conspirator 1”, a “former president of the United States who spread false claims of election fraud following the 2020 election”.There were also attempts to add caveats to the language in the documents signed by the fake electors in Arizona to note that they were intended only as a backup plan should judges rule in Trump’s favor, but that did not happen, the indictment alleges.The false electors included two sitting state senators, Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern. It’s not clear how or if the state senate will respond to these charges or if it will affect their legislative actions. The senate Republicans’ spokeswoman told the Guardian she checked with a rules attorney in the chamber, who “verified there is no protocol on such a matter, as people are presumed innocent until proven guilty”.The former Arizona Republican party chair Kelli Ward was charged, as was her husband, Michael. Tyler Bowyer, a Republican national committeeman and Turning Point Action executive, was also charged, as were the other fake electors Jim Lamon, Nancy Cottle, Robert Montgomery, Samuel Moorhead, Lorraine Pellegrino and Gregory Safsten.The Trumpworld figures charged include high-profile allies such as the former New York City mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, the former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, the lawyer John Eastman, the adviser Boris Epshteyn, the attorney Jenna Ellis, the current election integrity counsel for the Republican National Committee, Christina Bobb, and the former Trump campaign operative Mike Roman.In initial documents, the names of Trump allies are redacted, making it somewhat difficult to track who allegedly said what to whom. They are identifiable by their descriptions or other details.Mayes, who won her race by less than 300 votes in 2022, is already in the Republican-led legislature’s crosshairs for this investigation and a host of other issues where she, a Democrat, is at odds with GOP lawmakers. The state house opened a committee to investigate her and her use of the office. The charges are sure to further inflame Republican lawmakers.Hoffman issued a statement saying he was innocent and intended to “vigorously” defend himself against the charges, and that Mayes had weaponized the attorney general’s office for political reasons. “I look forward to the day when I am vindicated of this disgusting political persecution by the judicial process,” he wrote.Kern responded with an “LOL!!” and changed the subject to abortion when a commenter on X said he should resign immediately. The Arizona Republican party put out a statement calling the timing of the indictments “suspiciously convenient and politically motivated” and an example of election interference, a favorite claim of Trump himself in the face of a host of charges.Charlie Kirk, the founder of the rightwing youth organization Turning Point, said he and the organization stand by Bowyer and the others charged.“The Arizona Trump electors were doing what they thought was a legally necessary step as part of a wider political and electoral dispute,” Kirk wrote on X. “They acted in the belief that Donald Trump was the true winner of Arizona in the 2020 election. They engaged in no fraud and no deception. In fact, they literally published a press release explaining what they were doing!”Didn’t hedge language despite a warningOf the seven states that saw a similar fake electors scheme, those in Pennsylvania and New Mexico used language that indicated the electors who signed for Trump were contingent on the signers later being certified as the “duly elected and qualified electors” because of court interventions that were outstanding at the time.Arizona’s documents include no such hedge, instead saying the people who signed on claimed to be the “duly elected and qualified electors” for Trump in the state.The indictment claims a Pennsylvania attorney raised concerns about that language on 12 December 2020 and requested adding in the contingency language. After that, “unindicted co-conspirator 4”, who appears to be the scheme’s architect, the attorney Kenneth Chesebro, texted a Trump campaign official to point out the issue.View image in fullscreen“Mike, I think the language at start of certificate should be changed in all states. Let’s look at the language carefully,” Chesebro wrote to a Trump ally, presumably Mike Roman.Chesebro said the hedged language could help prevent the false electors from “possibly facing legal exposure (at the hands of a partisan AG) if they seem to certify that they are currently the valid electors”.“I don’t,” the person responded. After Chesebro offered to help draft the language, the Trump operative responded: “Fuck these guys,” according to the indictment.The pressure campaignTo build the narrative of the case, the indictment walks through Trump and his allies’ intense pressure campaign on the Maricopa county board of supervisors, the state legislature and the governor, all of whom played some role in election oversight.The details here are now publicly well-known – they include calls from the White House and Trump allies to people such as the former House speaker Rusty Bowers and the county supervisor Clint Hickman, as well as a call from the White House to the former governor Doug Ducey on the day he signed off on the certification of votes.Also mentioned is the backlash and ensuing harassment that some of these officials faced from members of their own party for refusing to take part in the efforts to overturn the results.The indictment walks through the various lawsuits the Trump campaign and other state Republicans filed to try to get their claims of election fraud affirmed in court or disrupt the results in some way, none of which succeeded.Ward worked to organize the Trump electors along with others. She expressed concerns that, if there weren’t an appeal filed in one of the election cases contesting results, it “could appear treasonous” to sign on as an alternate slate without any pending court cases. An appeal in one case, Ward v Jackson, was filed in time for the slate to vote on 14 December 2020.One appeal, the indictment notes, was filed quickly as a way to “give legal ‘cover’ for the electors in AZ to ‘vote’” to create their slate, a person labeled as “unindicted co-conspirator 5”, believed to be the Arizona attorney Jack Wilenchik, wrote in an email at the time.As proof of the intent to throw the election to Trump, the indictment mentions meetings between Pence, his staff and someone who appears to be Eastman from contextual clues, where the Trump ally lays out to Pence how he could reject electoral votes from certain states, delay the court and ask state legislatures to instead step in and declare a winner. During a meeting with Pence’s chief counsel, a charged Trump associate “admitted that his plan would lose if it went before the US supreme court”, the indictment says.The indictment also notes a memo written on 23 December 2020 that envisions Pence refusing to count the Biden electors from Arizona and other states with fake slates because there were multiple slates from those places, thus giving Trump a majority of the remaining electoral votes. This memo, other reporting from the Washington Post confirms, was written by Eastman.Pence did not follow through, to the dismay of Trump and his allies.Using their own wordsThe attorney general uses the fake electors’ own words, often displayed publicly on social media platforms, to show their intent was not simply to offer an alternate slate in the face of a potential court order, but to pressure the vice-president and others to use the Trump electors instead.On 14 December 2020, at the state Republican party headquarters, the electors signed on for Trump. The party posted a picture and video of it to X. Ward wrote, “Oh yes we did! We are the electors who represent the legal voters of Arizona! #Trump2020 #MAGA.” The party released a statement on the action that was similar to a template created by Chesebro, the indictment says.The next day, Bowyer, of Turning Point, described the move as giving “potential ground to not accept electors from states with competing electors”, the indictment says.Later that month, the 11 fake electors signed on to a lawsuit against Pence from the Texas congressman Louie Gohmert seeking to have the court declare Pence had the authority to decide which electoral votes to use in states that had multiple slates, according to the indictment.After the Gohmert case was filed, Bowyer wrote on X that the vice-president had the “awesome power” of selecting which slate to use when there were two competing ones, or to select neither.Kern gave an interview to the conspiracy website Epoch Times where he said the dual slates gave Pence the choice to pick one or the other and that would then likely lead to a “contested electoral process” on 6 January.“It’s going to be just a nice constitutional lesson for all of America to see,” Kern said, according to the indictment. A couple days later, Kern called on state leaders to bring an emergency legislative session to “decertify” the Biden electors, then convene a grand jury to investigate election fraud claims. He also was at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.The day before the insurrection, Hoffman wrote to Pence and asked him to delay certification and get clarity from the legislature over which slate was “proper and accurate”.Based on their statements and machinations behind the scenes, the indictment concludes that the defendants “deceived the public with false claims of election fraud in order to prevent the lawful transfer of the presidency, to keep Unindicted Coconspirator 1 in office against the will of Arizona’s voters, and deprive Arizona voters of their right to vote and have their votes counted”. More

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      Liz Cheney urges US supreme court to rule quickly on Trump’s immunity claim

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      The former congresswoman and co-chair of the House January 6 committee Liz Cheney is urging the US supreme court to rule quickly on Donald Trump’s claim that he has immunity from prosecution for acts he committed while president – so that his 2020 election interference trial can begin before the 2024 election this November.“If delay prevents this Trump case from being tried this year, the public may never hear critical and historic evidence developed before the grand jury, and our system may never hold the man most responsible for January 6 to account,” Cheney wrote in an opinion article for the New York Times, published on Monday.Trump faces four federal election subversion charges, arising from his attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020, fueled by his lie about electoral fraud and culminating in the deadly attack on Congress by extremist supporters, urged on by the then president, on 6 January 2021.Cheney warned: “I know how Mr Trump’s delay tactics work,” adding: “Mr Trump believes he can threaten and intimidate judges and their families, assert baseless legal defenses and thereby avoid accountability altogether.”The special counsel Jack Smith, prosecuting the case against Trump, has urged the court to reject Trump’s immunity claim as “an unprecedented assault on the structure of our government”.Cheney, a Republican and the daughter of the former vice-president Dick Cheney, was ousted from her congressional seat, representing Wyoming, after she became one of the strongest voices from the GOP demanding Trump be held accountable for inciting and failing to stop the January 6 insurrection.She has since said she would prefer Democrats to win in the 2024 elections over members of her own party as it has become more extreme, because she feared the US was “sleepwalking into dictatorship” and that another Trump White House presented a tangible “threat” to American democracy.Cheney said in her New York Times article: “The special counsel’s indictment lays out Mr Trump’s detailed plan to overturn the 2020 election … [and that] senior advisers in the White House, Justice Department and elsewhere repeatedly warned that Mr Trump’s claims of election fraud were false and that his plans for January 6 were illegal.”She added: “If Mr Trump’s tactics prevent his January 6 trial from proceeding in the ordinary course, he will also have succeeded in concealing critical evidence from the American people – evidence demonstrating his disregard for the rule of law, his cruelty on January 6 and the deep flaws in character that make him unfit to serve as president. The Supreme Court should understand this reality and conclude without delay that no immunity applies here.”The court’s nine-member bench leans very conservative, especially after Trump nominated three rightwing justices while he was president. The court hears oral arguments in the immunity case on Thursday.Trump and his team urged the court to find that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts they take in office and therefore dismiss the federal criminal case. More

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      The America depicted in Civil War is not half as alarming as the real one | Emma Brockes

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      As the supreme court heard arguments relating to the 6 January riot and Donald Trump sat in a criminal court in Manhattan, cinemas across America have been showing scenes from an imagined world after the end of democracy. The movie Civil War, written and directed by Alex Garland, depicts a conflict-ridden US in which rebel forces battle to overthrow the government. As a thought experiment, this would be a lot more fun in a year in which a man with 91 felony charges wasn’t standing for his second term as president. As it is, the film currently at No 1 at the US box office is under some pressure to say something meaningful about where we are now.Civil War does have things to say: about how war is bad, and violence corrupts, and once things get under way people exploit the chaos for all sorts of reasons – which explains the presence of Florida in the film’s imagined secessionist uprising. It’s a gripping ride that, depending on your view, is either shrewdly non-partisan in a way that assumes the audience can fill in the gaps for themselves (the New York Times), an empty but entertaining romp with lots of explosions (the New Yorker) or a provocation to liberals who don’t understand what movies are for (the Hollywood Reporter). Meanwhile, in court this week, prospective jurors in the former president’s hush money trial were warned to keep details of themselves confidential, to preserve against the possibility of juror intimidation – the kind of deep background detail in which the film has no interest.View image in fullscreenInstead, we jump to an unspecified near-future in which the US president, a generic strongman played by Nick Offerman, has seized an illegal third term and disbanded the FBI. Two factions across three states have popped up to secede from the US, a coalition between Texas and California fighting under a two-star flag and calling themselves the Western Front, and, separately and with perfect on-brand randomness, Florida, doing its own thing. Much has been made of the political incompatibility of the coalition states, but, it seems to me, this was Garland’s smartest move: California and Texas both have strong regional identities combined with huge resources of land and money that make a coalition against a common enemy feasible.The problem in this scenario is this: where are the president’s supporters and what are they doing? The movie has no thoughts. There’s no explanation of who the president is, how he got to the White House or what happened to the popular movement that elected him. Instead, the story focuses on a band of plucky photojournalists, led by a brilliant Kirsten Dunst, as they battle to get from New York to the capital to document the fall of DC. In this studiously apolitical setup, we hear references to the “Portland Maoists” and the “Antifa massacre”, while the Western Front is stationed at Charlottesville – a loaded reference evoking the real-life dickheads who marched with tiki torches through that city in 2017 and who, per the film’s implication, eventually managed to upgrade their weapons supplier from Bed Bath & Beyond.View image in fullscreenThe intention of these scattergun political references, is, I suspect to make a point about the incoherence of war, or rather, the irrelevance of politics to those suffering at the sharp end. That’s not how it lands. The visual imagery is stunning in the manner of Garland’s brilliant 2002 zombie flick, 28 Days Later, in a way that in other years might have carried the film. There is the burnt-out shell of a JCPenney, a downed helicopter on one side in the car park. There is the creepy gas station attendant torturing looters he went to high school with out back. There is the spectacular, minutes-long assault on the West Wing.And here, in real life, is Trump, charged with falsifying business documents with an intention to violate election laws. Held up against the events that suggested the film in the first place, Civil War has about it a vibe of the guy who doesn’t vote because “they’re all as bad as each other”. The timing matters, and the blandness of the film’s politics, along with its can’t-be-arsed approach to broadening the scope of the story, makes it feel less like a cautionary tale and more like a piece of fantasy unanchored from history. Coming home on Tuesday and turning on the news to hear about Trump nodding off in court, I flashed to the under-imagined world of the film and thought: nah, couldn’t happen here. More

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      in US Politics

      US supreme court skeptical of using obstruction law in January 6 cases

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      The US supreme court expressed concern on Tuesday with prosecutors using an obstruction statute to charge hundreds of January 6 Capitol riot defendants, with the justices leaning towards a position that could jeopardize those prosecutions and the criminal case against Donald Trump.The Trump case was not mentioned at the argument. But a decision curtailing the use of the obstruction statute in connection with the Capitol attack could eliminate two of the four charges against the former president.The case, which on its face involves a January 6 riot defendant named Joseph Fischer, became of sudden importance last year after Trump was also charged with obstruction of an official proceeding over his efforts to stop Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election.At issue is whether the obstruction statute passed under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002 in the wake of the Enron scandal could be used to prosecute general instances of obstruction, or whether it was intended to be used more narrowly for evidence tampering or document destruction.If the supreme court decides that section 1512(c) of title 18 of the US criminal code was being used too broadly, it could cripple part of the case against Trump as the special counsel Jack Smith looks to draw a line at trial from the former president’s January 6 speech to the violence.And if the court moved to strike down the use of the obstruction statute, it could undercut the remaining conspiracy statutes used in the indictment against Trump.The US solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, arguing for the justice department, found herself repeatedly pressed on those points by the justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas – and John Roberts, the chief justice.When Congress passed the obstruction law, it was done in a two-part provision. The first part makes it a crime to corruptly alter, destroy or conceal evidence to frustrate official proceedings. The second part, at issue in Fischer’s case, makes it a crime to “otherwise” obstruct official proceedings.The argument from Prelogar contended that “otherwise” was designed as a catchall for any obstructive conduct that Congress might not have imagined when the law was being drafted. Prelogar’s point was that the theme of the law was outlawing all obstruction.Fischer’s lawyer, Jeffrey Green, argued that was too broad: “otherwise” should be defined as engaging in “similar” conduct as expressed in the first part of the statute – to do with obstructing an investigation or evidence tampering – done in a different way.Alito and Gorsuch appeared deeply skeptical of the justice department’s position. They suggested repeatedly that Prelogar’s reading of the law was overly expansive, peppering her with hypotheticals.Would delaying an official proceeding count as obstruction? How significant did the delay have to be to count as obstruction? Gorsuch asked. Alito added that the statute mentioned obstruction but also mentioned “impeding” proceedings, which, he said, was less serious than obstruction.Prelogar, on the defensive, was eventually pressed into replying that peaceful protests would be a technical violation of the law, even if the justice department was unlikely to prosecute minor disturbances, drawing a contrast to the events of January 6.But that invited Alito to ask how Prelogar would define minor disturbances. Would it be a minor disturbance if people heckled a court hearing, delaying the hearing and causing lawyers to lose their train of thought? Prelogar’s definition would encompass everything and anything in between, Alito suggested.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThomas also appeared concerned with the enforcement history of the obstruction statute. Prelogar took the opportunity to point out that the justice department had previously prosecuted cases of interfering with a grand jury investigation and interfering with federal court proceedings.But in rebuttal, Fischer’s lawyer suggested that her examples supported his position, because both were related to the use of evidence in proceedings.The justice department’s position came under additional fire from Chief Justice Roberts, who noted that the supreme court in the past had eschewed the use of general statutes under the doctrine known as “ejusdem generis”.Roberts suggested he might credit a lower court ruling that found the first part of the statute limited the second part of the statute: if the first part was about tampering with evidence in an investigation, the second part follows with “otherwise” referring to other ways to tamper with evidence.The skepticism from the conservative-leaning justices on the supreme court was not shared by Sonia Sotomayor, the justice who appeared to firmly see the “otherwise” language being used as a reference to any obstructive conduct.Sotomayor separately raised her own hypothetical of rules that prohibited photographing or otherwise disturbing a theatrical performance. If a defendant heckled and disturbed the performance, no one would be surprised if they were ejected, Sotomayor suggested to Fischer’s lawyer. More

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      Several January 6 rioters get early releases ahead of supreme court review

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      Several January 6 rioters have won early release from their sentences ahead of a key supreme court review of the legality of a specific federal charge against them – a review that could, in turn, see them ordered to return to prison.A decision on the legal issue, which revolves around how January 6 prosecutors distinguished between conduct qualifying as “obstructing an official proceeding” of Congress and misdemeanor offenses, including shouting to interrupt a congressional hearing, is not expected until the summer, according to the Washington Post.The decision could impact convictions and sentences passed on more than 350 January 6 defendants if the supreme court decides that prosecutors misused criminal statutes to obtain the convictions.Three men have already been granted early releases, according to the Post.They include a Delaware man who carried a Confederate flag into the Capitol and was released one year into a three-year term; a Ohio man who broke through police lines to become one of the first rioters to enter the building, released six months into a 19-month sentence; and a man who entered the Senate chamber draped in a Trump flag, who was freed after serving five months of a 14-month sentence.The law that prosecutors used to charge the men was passed after the collapse of energy trading firm Enron in 2001 and crafted to limit accounting corruption. But the charge was used to prosecute some January 6 rioters in place of charging sedition or insurrection violations.The legality of using the obstruction charge has mostly been upheld by January 6 trial judges, but two judges, one Trump-appointed, have argued that it applies only to tampering or destruction of evidence.In 2021, one of those federal judges, Randolph Moss, said the government could face a “constitutional vagueness problem” if it could not articulate to the courts how the charge distinguished between obstruction of Congress and ordinary trespassing.If the supreme court decides the obstruction charge was not suitable for the January 6 rioters, the decision could also affect the election interference case against Donald Trump.Retired US district judge Thomas F Hogan, who passed sentence on 26 January 6 defendants, told Georgetown law school students earlier this year that if the supreme court rejects the use of the law it “would have a devastating effect on the prosecution side” of January 6 prosecutions that didn’t involve violence.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAmong those who could see their convictions overturned by the supreme court is Jacob Chansley, known as the “QAnon shaman” and wore a horned headdress, who was charged under the law. Other include members of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys extremist groups.Prosecutors have urged judges to delay releasing the men charged only under the contested obstruction law pending the supreme court appeal, arguing in one case that doing so into another presidential election, “would be releasing defendant into the same political maelstrom that led him to commit his crimes in the first place”. More

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr vows to investigate January 6 prosecutions for political bias

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr, the lawyer, conspiracy theorist and independent candidate for US president, vowed to investigate “whether prosecutorial discretion was abused for political ends” in convictions of January 6 rioters – just one day after his campaign said a fundraising reference to such prisoners as “activists” was an unfortunate error.In a statement on Friday, Kennedy said that as president, he would “appoint a special counsel – an individual respected by all sides – to investigate whether prosecutorial discretion was abused for political ends in this case, and I will right any wrongs that we discover”.On 6 January 2021, Donald Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol after the former president told them to “fight like hell” to block certification of his defeat by Joe Biden. Nine deaths are linked to the attack, including law enforcement suicides. More than 1,300 arrests have been made and nearly 1,000 convictions secured, some for seditious conspiracy. Some rioters have been held before trial.Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection but acquitted when enough Senate Republicans stayed loyal. Now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Trump has called January 6 prisoners “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots”; promoted a rendition of the national anthem performed in a Washington jail; and said that if re-elected, he will “free the January 6 hostages being wrongfully imprisoned”.Earlier this week, the Kennedy campaign ran into a media firestorm when a fundraising email referred to “J6 activists sitting in a Washington DC jail cell stripped of their constitutional liberties” and compared them to Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower who lives in exile in Russia, and Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder held in the UK while the US seeks extradition.Amid uproar, a Kennedy spokesperson said: “That statement was an error that does not reflect Mr Kennedy’s views. It was inserted by a new marketing contractor and slipped through the normal approval process.”But on Friday, Kennedy indicated that he does think some January 6 prisoners might be activists wrongly imprisoned.“January 6 is one of the most polarising topics on the political landscape,” he said. “I am listening to people of diverse viewpoints on it in order to make sense of the event and what followed. I want to hear every side.“It is quite clear that many of the January 6 protesters broke the law in what may have started as a protest but turned into a riot. Because it happened with the encouragement of President Trump, and in the context of his delusion that the election was stolen from him, many people see it not as a riot but as an insurrection.“I have not examined the evidence in detail, but reasonable people, including Trump opponents, tell me there is little evidence of a true insurrection. They observe that the protesters carried no weapons, had no plans or ability to seize the reins of government, and that Trump himself had urged them to protest ‘peacefully’.”That statement was in accordance with others, collected by NBC News, in which Kennedy has questioned or dismissed the severity of events on January 6.View image in fullscreenFurthermore, the House committee that investigated January 6 detailed how protesters did carry weapons, some armed with guns; how Trump whipped up the crowd before belatedly appealing for calm; and how the riot followed lengthy attempts to find a legalistic way to keep Trump in power.“Like many reasonable Americans,” Kennedy continued, “I am concerned about the possibility that political objectives motivated the vigour of the prosecution of the J6 defendants, their long sentences, and their harsh treatment.”Echoing claims by Trump and Republicans in Congress, he said: “That would fit a disturbing pattern of the weaponisation of government agencies … against political opponents. One can, as I do, oppose Donald Trump and all he stands for, and still be disturbed by the weaponisation of government against him.”Kennedy polls in double figures, has attracted millions of dollars in donations, has named a running mate (Nicole Shanahan, an attorney) and is seeking ballot access in key states. But he remains most likely to act as a spoiler in November, siphoning votes from both candidates but, many observers think, doing more damage to Biden.In his Friday statement, Kennedy claimed to be following the example of the second US president, John Adams, “a staunch patriot” who in 1770 took on an unpopular task, “defend[ing] the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre”.Kennedy also said Democrats as well as Republicans were “using J6 to pour fuel on the fire of America’s divisions”, and charged both parties with “demonising … opponents as apocalyptic threats to democracy”.Many observers, however, view Kennedy himself as a threat to US democracy.On Friday, before Kennedy issued his statement about January 6, Rahna Epting of Move On, a progressive advocacy group, and Matthew Bennett of Third Way, a centre-left group, described to reporters plans to switch from campaigning against No Labels, the centrist group that dropped out of the presidential race this week, to targeting Kennedy and his campaign.“I want to be clear,” Epting said. “Robert Kennedy Jr’s ill-fated run for the presidency is helping put Donald Trump back in the White House and we’re going to work to stop that. Just as we organised against No Labels we’re going to organise against Robert Kennedy Jr. We’re going to let folks know we can’t win, but he can help Trump win.” More