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      FBI chief calls Capitol attack domestic terrorism and rejects Trump’s fraud claims

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      The FBI director, Christopher Wray, has said that the bureau considers the 6 January Capitol attack an act of “domestic terrorism” and suggested that “serious charges” were still to come in its continuing criminal investigation.Testifying before Congress on Thursday, the director rubbished Donald Trump’s claims about a stolen presidential election. “We did not find evidence of fraud that could have changed the outcome of the election,” he told lawmakers on the House judiciary committee.Wray’s testimony came as federal prosecutors charged six members of a rightwing militia group with conspiring to storm the Capitol, the latest in a series of such charges arising from 6 January.Democratic lawmakers repeatedly grilled Wray, appointed by Trump in 2017, over what they said were intelligence failures that left law enforcement ill-prepared for the deadly attack.“The FBI’s inaction in the weeks leading up to January 6 is simply baffling,” said Jerry Nadler, the House judiciary committee chairman. “It is hard to tell whether FBI headquarters merely missed the evidence – which had been flagged by your field offices and was available online for all the world to see – or whether the bureau saw the intelligence, underestimated the threat, and simply failed to act.”A Senate report recently concluded that the deadly insurrection had been planned “in plain sight” but that warnings had gone unheeded due to a troubling mix of bad communications, poor planning, faulty equipment and lack of leadership.Wray said that “almost none” of the 500 people charged so far with participating in the attack had been under FBI investigation previously, suggesting it would have been difficult for the FBI to have monitored them in advance.“You can be darn sure that we are going to be looking hard at how we can do better, how we can do more, how we can do things differently in terms of collecting and disseminating” intelligence, Wray said.Thursday’s charges against six men, all from California, were disclosed in an indictment unsealed in federal court in Washington. Two of them, Alan Hostetter and Russell Taylor, were seen a day before the riot with Roger Stone, a friend and adviser to Trump, during a protest outside the US supreme court against the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.About 30 people – including members of two other rightwing groups, the Oath Keepers and Tte Proud Boys – have been accused of conspiracy, the most serious charges related to the riot. Those pending cases are the largest and most complex of the roughly 500 brought by the justice department since the attack.Asked whether the FBI was investigating Trump or Stone, Wray said he could neither confirm nor deny any FBI investigation.“I’m talking about Mr Big, No 1,” said the Tennessee Democrat Steve Cohen, referring to Trump. “Have you gone after the people who incited the riot?”Wray responded: “I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to be discussing whether or not we are or aren’t investigating specific individuals.”Wray also faced questions about the recent spate of ransomware attacks against major US companies. The FBI’s director told lawmakers that the bureau discouraged ransomware payments to hacking groups.“It is our policy, it is our guidance, from the FBI, that companies should not pay the ransom for a number of reasons,” Wray said.Still, recently hacked companies including Colonial Pipeline and JBS, the world’s largest meat processing company, have admitted paying millions to hackers in order to regain control of their computer systems.The justice department has said it was able to recover the majority of the ransomware payment made by Colonial Pipeline after locating the virtual wallet used by the hackers. More

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      in US Politics

      Schumer plans to force key votes to win over Democratic holdouts on filibuster

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      Top Democrats are preparing to make the case to impose new limits on the filibuster, in a move that could bring to a head six months of smoldering tensions over an expected Republican blockade of President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda.The Senate had its first filibuster of this Congress last week, when Republicans used the tactical rule to block a bipartisan House-passed measure to create a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Capitol attack perpetrated a pro-Trump mob.Even as a majority of senators voted in favor of the commission, the bill’s defeat at the hands of Republicans deploying the filibuster underscored the ease with which legislation can be blocked under current Senate rules that require a 60-vote margin in the 100-strong chamber.Republicans at the same time last week delayed a bipartisan measure aimed at improving American competitiveness with China, also proving to Democrats that the party was more interested in denying legislative wins to Biden than advancing bills that they helped write.Now, in an attempt to demonstrate Republicans have all but turned the filibuster into a weapon to wage bad-faith politics, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is embarking on a strategy to force votes on some of Biden’s most high-profile measures.The idea is to demonstrate to Democrats opposed to curbing the filibuster – most notably West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema – that Republicans will sink any Democratic policy, giving Schumer no choice but to defuse the procedural rule in order to pass Biden’s vision.The problem, as Democrats see it, is that Republicans have effectively rewritten Senate rules to force supermajorities for bills that carry widespread public and congressional support. Filibustering bills, once extremely rare, has now become routine.“Will our Republican colleagues let the Senate debate the bill, or will they engage in another partisan filibuster of urgent legislation? We will soon see,” Schumer said last week, previewing his intentions.It is a replica of the playbook followed by then-Senate majority leader Harry Reid in 2013 to gather Democratic support to impose limits on the filibuster, after Republicans blocked former President Barack Obama’s picks for cabinet posts and the federal judiciary.But it remains far from clear whether Schumer can find the same success in persuading the holdouts in the Senate Democratic caucus to move ahead with what is known on Capitol Hill as the “nuclear option” of limiting the filibuster.The political moment confronting Schumer is far darker than the one experienced by Reid, who by virtue of having a larger Democratic majority in the 2013 Senate, did not need to convince all of his senators, such as Manchin, to support changing the rules.In addition, Manchin has come out publicly against making any reforms to the filibuster so often to this Congress, that he may be unable to backtrack even if successfully convinced of the need for imposing new restrictions.Writing in a recent op-ed published in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin warned that “partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy”, and reiterated he would not vote to remove or modify the filibuster.The situation is similar with Sinema, who said during the Memorial Day recess that she would not budge on reforming the filibuster, having previously noted the perils of changing Senate rules that offer the minority party wide latitude to block action.But with Biden’s ambitious political agenda imperiled by expected Republican filibusters, Schumer has reached the point where he believes the only way to pass bills offered by Democrats is to escalate the fight, according to a source familiar with his thinking.The pressure is only likely to increase on Manchin and Sinema in the coming weeks, with Schumer pledging this month to hold a vote on S1, the sweeping voting rights measure expanding ballot access and controls on campaign contributions, known as the For the People Act.In the struggle for voting rights, Democrats have rested their hopes on S1 for turning back a wave of new voting restrictions that grew out of former president Donald Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud enacted by Republican statehouses nationwide.The political stakes, as well as the implications for the country at large, are huge: Democrats believe the bill’s passage could allow them to overrule such state-level mandates, while its failure could allow Republicans to marginalize Black, Asian and minority voters.Against such a backdrop, Schumer’s plan has rattled Republicans. And on Monday, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell railed against the planned series of votes, slamming it as a partisan ploy that is “transparently designed to fail”.“Senate Democrats intend to focus this month on the demands of their radical base,” McConnell said. More

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      Democratic splits grow as key senator Manchin says no to voting rights bill

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      Growing fissures in Democratic ranks were evident on Monday over West Virginia senator Joe Manchin’s public opposition to the For the People Act, a sweeping measure to protect voting rights that are under assault from Republicans in numerous states – and also his stance against scrapping the filibuster.The filibuster is the rule under which the Senate minority, currently the Republicans, has the power to thwart the majority’s will on most legislation.Manchin is a centrist Democrat, but one progressive congressman called him “the new Mitch McConnell”, for helping the Republican Senate leader in his quest to stop progress on the Democrats’ agenda at all costs.In a column for the Charleston Gazette-Mail on Sunday, Manchin said he opposed the For the People Act, or HR1, which currently has no Republican support in the Senate, because “partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy”.He also reiterated his support of the filibuster, under which 60 votes are needed to pass most legislation. The Senate is split 50-50 between the two parties and controlled by Democrats only through Kamala Harris’s casting vote as vice-president.Anger over Manchin’s stand was particularly fierce among African Americans, a key constituency in elections which gave Democrats control of the White House and Congress and subsequently a key target of Republican efforts to restrict ballot access in Florida, Georgia, Texas and elsewhere.Mondaire Jones, a New York congressman, referred to the era of racial segregation in the US south when he said: “Manchin’s op-ed might as well be titled, ‘Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim Crow.’”The writer Jemele Hill elaborated: “This is so on brand for this country. Record number of black voters show up to save this democracy, only for white supremacy to be upheld by a cowardly, power-hungry white dude. Joe Manchin is a clown.”Speaking to CNN on Monday, congressman Jamaal Bowman of New York called Manchin “the new Mitch McConnell”.“Mitch McConnell during [Barack] Obama’s presidency said he would do everything in his power to stop Obama,” he said.“He’s also repeated that now, during the Biden presidency, by saying he would do everything in his power to stop President Biden. And now Joe Manchin is doing everything in his power to stop democracy and stop our work for the people, that work that the people sent us here to do.”Manchin has in fact voted with Biden most of the time so far, and has said he backs the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would restore ballot protections gutted by the US supreme court in 2013.Asked if it was fair to attack Manchin so stringently, Bowman said: “HR1 has popularity in West Virginia and across the country. Well over 65% of the American people support HR1, and well over 50% of Republicans support HR1.“The American people sent us to Washington to do a job. Just a few weeks ago, we had a bipartisan piece of legislation looking to form a commission to study the 6 January insurrection, the first attack on our Capitol since the War of 1812. It was a bipartisan piece of legislation, and it did not pass. Why? Because of the filibuster, and because the majority of Republicans are focused much more on obstruction.”A study by the Center for American Progress found that Republicans have used filibusters roughly twice as often as Democrats to stop legislation.Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader and New York Democrat, has said he will bring the For the People Act up for a vote this month. At the outset of a new legislative session on Monday, he appealed for Democrats to stick together.“I want to be clear that the next few weeks will be hard and will test our resolve as a Congress and a conference,” Schumer wrote to colleagues, as reported by the Hill. “The American people gave us a Democratic Senate to produce big and bold action on the major issues confronting us. And that is what we will do.”As the influential Punchbowl News put it on Monday morning, however: “Any legislative strategy that involves dumping the filibuster and then passing a bill is going to fail. That much is clear. If you don’t get that by now, we don’t know how to help you.”Unlike his fellow centrist and filibuster supporter, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Manchin voted for the 6 January commission, which would have investigated an event which Donald Trump incited in service of his lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” and he won, not Joe Biden.On Monday, Trump backed Manchin in his support for the filibuster, telling Fox Business: “It’s a very important thing. Otherwise you’re going to be packing the courts, you’re going to be doing all sorts of very bad things that were unthinkable.”The former president’s words were not without attendant irony.In July 2017, faced with the failure of attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Trump famously tweeted against the filibuster rule: “Republican Senate must get rid of 60 vote NOW! It is killing the R Party, allows 8 Dems to control country. 200 Bills sit in Senate. A JOKE!”McConnell, then Senate majority leader, refused to budge. Now that he is the Senate minority leader, McConnell is still immovable. More

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      in US Politics

      Joe Manchin opposes For the People Act in blow to Democrats’ voting rights push

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      In a huge blow to Democrats’ hopes of passing sweeping voting rights protections, the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin said on Sunday he would not support his party’s flagship bill – because of Republican opposition to it.The West Virginia senator is considered a key vote to pass the For the People Act, which would ensure automatic and same-day registration, place limits on gerrymandering and restore voting rights for felons.Many Democrats see the bill as essential to counter efforts by Republicans in state government to restrict access to the ballot and to make it more easy to overturn election results.It would also present voters with a forceful answer to Donald Trump’s continued lies about electoral fraud, which the former president rehearsed in a speech in North Carolina on Saturday.In a column for the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin said: “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act.”Manchin’s opposition to the bill also known as HR1 could prove crucial in the evenly split Senate. His argument against the legislation focused on Republican opposition to the bill and did not specify any issues with its contents.Manchin instead endorsed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a measure named for the late Georgia Democratic congressman and campaigner which would reauthorize voting protections established in the civil rights era but eliminated by the supreme court in 2013.Manchin’s op-ed might as well be titled, Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim CrowManchin also reiterated his support for the filibuster, which gives 41 of 100 senators the ability to block action by the majority.Democrats are seeking to abolish the filibuster, arguing that Republicans have repeatedly abused it to support minority positions on issues like gun control and, just last month, to block the establishment of an independent commission to investigate the attack on the US Capitol.Republicans have used the filibuster roughly twice as often as Democrats to prevent the other party from passing legislation, according to a study by the Center for American Progress.“I have always said, ‘If I can’t go home and explain it, I can’t vote for it,’” Manchin wrote. “And I cannot explain strictly partisan election reform or blowing up the Senate rules to expedite one party’s agenda.”In a sign of growing frustration within Manchin’s own party, Mondaire Jones, a progressive congressman from New York, tweeted that his op-ed “might as well be titled, ‘Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim Crow.’”Jim Crow was the name given to the system of legalised segregation which dominated southern states between the end of the civil war in 1865 and the civil rights era of the 1960s.On the Sunday talk shows, hosts pressed Manchin on whether his expectations of a bipartisan solution on voting rights were realistic in such a divided Congress, and with a Republican party firmly in thrall to Donald Trump.Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace told him that if he were to threaten to vote against the filibuster, it could incentivize Republicans to negotiate on legislation.“Haven’t you empowered Republicans to be obstructionists?” Wallace asked.“I don’t think so,” Manchin said. “Because we have seven brave Republicans that continue to vote for what they know is right and the facts as they see them, not worrying about the political consequences.”Seven Republican defections from the pro-Trump party line is not enough to beat the filibuster, even if all 50 Democrats remain united. Manchin said he was hopeful other Republicans would “rise to the occasion”.Wallace asked if he was being “naive”, noting that the Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said in May: “One hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration.”“I’m not being naive,” Manchin said. “I think he’s 100% wrong in trying to block all the good things that we’re trying to do for America. It would be a lot better if we had participation and we’re getting participation.”With the Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, Manchin has emerged as one of the most powerful figures in Washington, by virtue of his centrist views in a Senate split on starkly partisan lines. In Tulsa this week, in a remark that risked angering Manchin, Biden said the two senators “vote more with my Republican friends”, though their voting record does not actually reflect this.On CBS’s Face the Nation, host John Dickerson asked Manchin if his bipartisan ideals were outdated.Dickerson noted that since the 2020 election put Democrats in control of Washington, Republicans in the states have introduced more than 300 bills featuring voting restrictions. Furthermore, Republicans who embraced baseless claims about the election being stolen are now running to be chief elections officials in several states.Dickerson asked: “Why would Republicans, when they’re making all these gains in the statehouses and achieving their goals in the states, why would they vote for a bill someday in the Senate that’s going to take away all the things they’re achieving right now in those statehouses?”Manchin said those state-level successes could ultimately damage Republicans.“The bottom line is the fundamental purpose of our democracy is the freedom of our elections,” Manchin said. “If we can’t come to an agreement on that, God help us.” More