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      Joe Biden hits the ground running by outlining national Covid strategy

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      Joe Biden began his first full day as president confronting a host of major crises facing his fledgling administration, starting with a flurry of actions to address his most pressing challenge: the raging Covid-19 pandemic.At a White House event on Thursday afternoon, Biden unveiled a new national strategy to combat the coronavirus, which has killed more than 404,000 Americans and infected more than 24 million since it first began spreading across the US one year ago, by far the highest totals in the world.“For the past year, we couldn’t rely on the federal government to act with the urgency and focus and coordination we needed,” Biden said, referring to the administration of Donald Trump, which ended at midday the day before.“And we have seen the tragic costs of that failure,” he said.Biden again braced the nation for continued hardship, saying “it’s going to get worse before it gets better” and predicting the death toll could rise to 500,000 by the end of next month.Outlining his approach, Biden told Americans: “Help is on the way.”The actions on Thursday included an order to require mask-wearing on federal property, in airports and on many flights, trains, ships and long-distance buses, and also a huge push to speed up vaccinations, which have fallen far behind the government’s own schedule.“Mask up,” he said, waving a face mask. “For the first 100 days.”Even as he charted an aggressive approach to gain control of the virus, he was met with more bad news about the economy as another 900,000 people filed for unemployment benefits last week and he inherited the worst jobs market of any modern-day president.Biden and Harris began their day joined by family at the White House, where they virtually attended an inaugural prayer service held by the Washington National Cathedral, a tradition that has been reshaped by the pandemic.The president, members of his family as well as his vice-president, Kamala Harris, and her husband sat physically distanced in the Blue Room of the White House to stream the interfaith service. Many of the speakers extended prayers and blessings to the new leaders.The Rev William Barber, a preacher from North Carolina and civil rights leader who leads an anti-poverty campaign, delivered the homily, calling on the new administration to address what he called the “five interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation/denial of healthcare, the war economy, and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism”.“No, America has never yet been all that she has hoped to be,” Barber said. “But right here, right now, a third reconstruction is possible if we choose.”And on Thursday morning John Kerry warned, in his first remarks as the US’s new climate envoy, that the world was lagging behind the required pace of change needed to avert catastrophic impacts from the climate crisis.Kerry, the former US secretary of state in the Obama-Biden administration, acknowledged that America had been absent from the international effort to contain dangerous global heating during Donald Trump’s presidency but added: “Today no country and no continent is getting the job done.”The FBI director, Christopher Wray, will remain in the role, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said on Thursday. During her first press briefing on Wednesday, Psaki raised speculation that his job was in jeopardy when she declined to publicly state whether Biden had confidence in him.“I caused an unintentional ripple yesterday, so wanted to state very clearly President Biden intends to keep FBI Director Wray on in his role and he has confidence in the job he is doing,” she said in a tweet on Thursday.Wray took the helm at the agency in 2017 after Trump fired his predecessor, James Comey, just four years into what is traditionally a 10-year term. Wray’s future had been in doubt for much of the past year, as Trump openly criticized the director and the agency.Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Biden’s nominee for transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, appeared at his Senate confirmation hearing while the House prepared to initiate Trump’s second impeachment trial.In an opening statement, Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who ran against Biden for the Democratic nomination, said there was a “bipartisan appetite for a generational opportunity to transform and improve America’s infrastructure”.The Senate, which officially switched to Democratic control on Wednesday after the swearing-in of three new senators, two from Georgia, has never held an impeachment trial for a former president.Some Republicans have argued that it is not constitutional to try an official who has left office, but many scholars disagree. Democrats say they are ready to move forward as negotiations continue between the chambers over the scope and timing of a trial.After impeaching Trump for an unprecedented second time last week, the House has yet to transmit to the Senate the article charging Trump with “incitement of insurrection” over his role in encouraging a crowd of loyalists that attacked the US Capitol on 6 January in an effort to stop the certification of his defeat.At a press conference on Thursday, Pelosi refused to say when the House would send the article beyond that it “won’t be long”. More

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      US lawmakers ask FBI to investigate Parler app's role in Capitol attack

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      American lawmakers have asked the FBI to investigate the role of Parler, the social media website and app popular with the American far right, in the violence at the US Capitol on 6 January.Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House oversight and reform Committee, asked the FBI to review Parler’s role “as a potential facilitator of planning and incitement related to the violence, as a repository of key evidence posted by users on its site, and as a potential conduit for foreign governments who may be financing civil unrest in the United States”.Maloney asked the FBI to review Parler’s financing and its ties to Russia.Maloney cited press reports that detailed violent threats on Parler against state elected officials for their role in certifying the election results before the 6 January attack that left five dead. She also noted numerous Parler users have been arrested and charged with threatening violence against elected officials or for their roles in the attack.She cited justice department charges against a Texas man who used a Parler account to post threats that he would return to the Capitol on 19 January “carrying weapons and massing in numbers so large that no army could match them”.The justice department said the threats were viewed by other social media users tens of thousands of times.Parler was launched in 2018 and won more users in the last months of the Trump presidency as social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook cracked down more forcefully on falsehoods and misinformation.The social network, which resembles Twitter, fast became the hottest app among American conservatives, with high-profile proponents like Senator Ted Cruz recruiting new users.But following the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol, Google banned it from Google Play and Apple suspended it from the App Store.Amazon then suspended Parler from its web hosting service AWS, in effect taking the site offline unless it could find a new company to host its services.The website partially returned online this week, though only displaying a message from its chief executive, John Matze, saying he was working to restore functionality, with the help of a Russian-owned technology company.Reuters reported this week that Parler partially resumed online operations.The FBI and Parler did not immediately respond to requests for comment.More than 25,000 national guard troops and new fencing ringed with razor wire were among the unprecedented security steps put in place ahead of Wednesday’s inauguration of President Joe Biden. More

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      Joe Biden sworn in as 46th president of the United States

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      Joseph Robinette Biden Jr has been sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, promising to marshal a spirit of national unity to guide the country through one of the most perilous chapters in American history.Speaking under a bright winter sky, as snow flurries melted and the clouds parted, Biden declared “democracy has prevailed” during a ceremony that honored the ritual transfer of power at the US Capitol, where exactly two weeks ago a swarm of supporters loyal to his predecessor stormed the building in a violent and futile last stand to overturn the results of the election.“This is America’s day,” Biden said, looking across the sprawl of the capital city’s national monuments, now guarded by a military garrison unprecedented in modern times, and devoid of spectators as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. “This is democracy’s day.”Millions of Americans watched from home as Chief Justice John Roberts administered the 35-word oath of office to Biden, moments before noon, when he formally inherited the powers of the presidency.[embedded content]“Few people in our nation’s history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we’re in now,” he said, promising to dedicate his “whole soul” to rebuilding a country ravaged by disease, economic turmoil, racial inequality and political division.Donald Trump, who never formally conceded his defeat, left the White House on Wednesday morning and was not in attendance, a final display of irreverence for the traditions and norms that have long shaped the presidency. Mike Pence, the outgoing vice-president, was there, joined by the Clintons, the Bushes and the Obamas.Hours after being sworn in, Biden was expected to begin undoing what his chief of staff described as “the gravest damages” of his predecessor’s legacy. Biden will sign 15 executive orders, as well as a flurry of memorandums and decrees from the Oval Office, according to his top policy advisers.He will immediately rejoin the Paris climate accords, end the effort to leave the World Health Organization, repeal a travel ban on several predominantly Muslim countries, revoke the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline and extend a pause on student loan payments and a federal moratorium on evictions and foreclosures.He will also send a sweeping immigration bill to Congress and will impose a national mandate requiring mask-wearing in federal buildings.Fear and anxiety surrounded the lead-up to Biden’s inauguration. The threat of more violence resulted in the deployment of nearly 25,000 national guard troops, transforming the shining city upon a hill into a military fortress.The pandemic had already greatly reshaped the inaugural events and ceremony, which typically draws hundreds of thousands of spectators to the National Mall. Much of the area was closed. Instead, flags from the states and territories represented those who the inaugural committee had urged to stay away, out of concern that large crowds would spread the coronavirus, which has now killed more than 400,000 Americans.Part of Biden’s legacy was secured even before he placed his hand atop a large, 19th-century Bible, a family heirloom accented with a Celtic cross and held by his wife, Jill Biden. Biden, the vice-president to the nation’s first black president, elevated Kamala Harris as America’s first female, first Black and first Asian American vice-president.“Don’t tell me things can’t change,” he said, marking explicitly the history of Harris’ ascension.The ceremony was enlivened by musical performances. Lady Gaga gave a towering rendition of the national anthem, Jennifer Lopez arrestingly mixed patriotic paeans with the pledge of allegiance in Spanish – “indivisible, con libertad y justicia para todos” – and Garth Brooks asked Americans to join him in singing Amazing Grace.Biden’s inauguration brings to a close one of the most volatile transitions in modern memory, an interregnum that tested the fragility of America’s commitment to an orderly and peaceful transition of power. For weeks after his defeat, Trump whipped up loyalists with baseless allegations of a stolen election.His claims were dismissed by dozens of courts, security experts, Republican election officials and his then attorney general. But Trump refused to accept his fate, a decision that culminated two weeks ago in the assault on the US Capitol, where rioters attempted to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s win.Biden said the events of the past few weeks offered “painful lesson” about the power of words and the threat of conspiracy.“There is truth and there are lies,” he said, reminding the nation’s political leaders, many of whom were arrayed onstage behind him, that it was their duty to “defend the truth and defeat the lies”.As Biden spoke, Trump was nearly 1,000 miles away, at his south Florida resort in Mar-a-Lago, where he concluded his historically unpopular presidency. Earlier on Wednesday, he held a farewell event for families and supporters. In his final hours as commander-in-chief, he boasted that the last four years had been “amazing by any standard” and promised he would “be back in some form”.Biden never mentioned his predecessor by name but struck a stark contrast in tone and tenor. During his remarks, he paused to observe a moment of silence to remember those who had died from the virus, acknowledging the pandemic’s grim toll in way Trump never did.Whereas Trump four years ago conjured dark visions of “American carnage”, Biden described a nation capable of overcoming daunting odds and seemingly incontrovertible divisions. He appealed for unity, a dominant theme of his presidential campaign, while recognizing that the plea might sound like “foolish fantasy” in an age governed by tribalism and partisan passions.“We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal,” he said.Nearly half a century after he was sworn in as one of the nation’s youngest senators, he became the oldest president to take the oath of office, at 78.A veteran of Washington first elected to the Senate in 1972, where he served until becoming vice-president under Barack Obama in 2009, Biden enters the White House with one of the deepest résumés in American political history, experience he will rely as he faces what he called “this time of testing”.Loss and recovery have marked his long career in public service. His first wife and his daughter were killed in a car accident days after his election to the Senate. In 2015, he buried his eldest son, Beau, who died of brain cancer. Biden’s rise to the presidency, the realization of a life’s dream, was paved with false starts and bad timing. A plagiarism scandal plagued his first run. Outshone by the history-making candidacy of his Democratic opponents in 2008, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Biden bowed out before the Iowa caucuses. Then, in 2015, still mourning the loss of his son, Biden opted not to run.But Trump’s presidency tormented him. Trump’s failure to forcefully condemn the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 was Biden’s motivation for launching a third presidential bid. Biden presented himself as a rebuke to Trump – an empathetic figure shaped by personal tragedy who believed he had something to offer the country at a moment of national tragedy.“We will be judged, you and I, by how we resolve these cascading crises of our era,” Biden said in his address. “Will we rise to the occasion, is the question. Will we master this rare and difficult hour? Will we meet our obligations and pass along a new and better world to our children? I believe we must.” More

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      The Guardian view on Joe Biden's inauguration: democracy prevails – for now | Editorial

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      It was a moment of immense relief across the world, rather than unbridled celebration. Washington saw an orderly transition of power at the Capitol, just two weeks after the attack on it; the departure of a man who has thrived on division and the anointment of Joe Biden, who pledges unity; the arrival of Kamala Harris – the first female vice-president and a woman of colour – after the racism and misogyny of Donald Trump. Yet there were no cheering crowds to greet the new president, and 25,000 members of the National Guard stood watch, thanks to his predecessor’s legacy: the deadly toll of the pandemic and the political violence epitomised by this month’s insurrection. That threat did not recede when the 46th president took his oath of office. It is part of America’s body politic, as are the bitter political forces that birthed it. Though Mr Trump was resoundingly defeated, more than 70 million Americans voted for him and a huge number of those now believe that President Biden stole his job. One in five voters supported the storming of the Capitol.Mr Trump, petty to the last, slunk away to Florida rather than face his defeat. But whether or not the twice-impeached ex-president can maintain political momentum, Trumpism in the broader sense is thriving. Its next standard bearer – there are plenty of hopefuls – could well be smarter and more dangerous. So the sombre mood was not only inevitable but apt. The perils facing the republic have rarely been greater. Mr Biden’s speech rose to the moment. He acknowledged the constant struggles of his nation, and the current dangers. But he also promised: “Democracy has prevailed … Our better angels have always prevailed.”The new president has promised a flurry of action, expecting little honeymoon. He must tackle the pandemic that has taken 400,000 American lives – a quarter of those in the past month – and the economic crisis, with 10 million fewer employed than a year ago; he plans a $1.9tn stimulus package. A slew of executive orders on his first afternoon – axing the Muslim travel ban; rejoining the Paris climate agreement – are set to reverse some of Mr Trump’s most egregious acts. But erasing the last four years is impossible. Only some policies can be enacted at the stroke of a pen. An ambitious legislative agenda must force its way through a 50/50 Senate. The Trump administration scrapped regulation and stacked courts. Above all, it tore apart the social and political fabric of the United States, making brazen lies, naked cruelty and hatred commonplace. Mr Trump was the product of his country’s failures, but further exposed and exacerbated them. Europe and other allies are breathing easier, but America’s standing cannot truly be restored until its domestic crises are resolved. At best, Mr Biden will begin to address them. He reminded his listeners that politics “does not have to be a raging fire destroying everything in its path”, in a call for honesty and decency that should be heard not only in the US, but across the Atlantic. Yet others are still pouring on the fuel. While some Republicans belatedly scramble for the vestiges of respectability, others continue to foment lies. Facts have become optional in the age of disinformation.Changing the president, as hard as it has been, was an easy task set against the challenge of binding up the nation’s wounds. But this is, at least, the removal of a dangerous man and the arrival of a president who believes in his oath of office. This inauguration brings hope, however tentative, at a time when the US desperately needs it. More

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      Biden prepares ambitious agenda even as he cleans up Trump's mess | Analysis

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      The last time a Democratic president took control of the White House, the wreckage he inherited was so great, there was little else his incoming team could prioritize.Twelve years ago, Barack Obama’s blunt-spoken chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, liked to describe the Republican legacy – a financial crisis, deep recession and two wars – as a giant shit sandwich wrapped in a red ribbon.Recovering from the economic crisis of George W Bush’s final year would require most of the Obama team’s focus in their first two years, when they controlled both sides of Congress with large majorities. Obama handed over his signature campaign issue – winding down the war in Iraq – to his vice-president to manage.Now that former vice-president takes over the presidency with even more wreckage to sift through.Joe Biden must overcome a pandemic, rebuild an economy, tackle racist insurrectionists and the ex-president who incited them, and reassert American leadership across a distrustful world. Somehow he must do all that while also confirming his senior officials in a Senate with no working majority.So far the Biden team shows no sign of limiting its ambition in terms of what it hopes Congress will take up – and what it will push through executive action – in its first days and weeks in power. In addition to signing a flurry of executive orders, rejoining the Paris climate accords and restarting the Iran nuclear deal, Biden will also propose sweeping immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for the undocumented.Comprehensive reform of the nation’s broken immigration system proved beyond the capabilities of both Bush and Obama. It was Bush’s failure to enact immigration reform in 2007 that effectively marked the end of his second-term agenda, as Republicans turned towards a nativist agenda that Donald Trump placed at the heart of his campaign and presidency.The Biden team may be marking a sharp break with the Trump years in prioritizing immigration reform. But what are their realistic prospects for legislative progress in the first year of the Biden presidency?Obama veterans think there may be one good reason why Biden can feel more optimistic about political progress than their own experience in 2009, when Republicans obstructed their action from the outset, would dictate. That reason is the legacy of one Donald Trump.“I think the difference between this and 2009 is that I believe there’s going to be a significant number of Republicans in Congress who think that their party needs a course correction here,” said Joel Benenson, who served as strategist and pollster to both Obama and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns. “It doesn’t mean they are suddenly going to be liberal Rockefeller Republicans, but the damage that Trump has done to the party and its image – and it has exacerbated through the events of the last two weeks – is giving them pause.“I don’t think it’s a major shift ideologically, but they have to recognize they are losing large and important sections of the electorate, and that’s going to be problematic for them. They know for their long-term prospects they can’t just be a base party. The biggest political failure of Donald Trump is that he didn’t fundamentally understand that to win the presidency, you have to win the center.”At the heart of that calculation is the singular figure of Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, who now finds himself in the minority after six years of control. McConnell was effective as an obstructionist force through the end of the Obama presidency, but he also can be a pragmatic figure when it comes to gaining and holding power.Recent polling underscores McConnell’s challenge: the majority of Republicans are fundamentally misaligned with the majority of the country. Almost two-thirds of the party falsely believes that Donald Trump won last year’s election, according to polling by the Pew Research Center. The same polling showed that more than two-thirds of Americans do not want Trump to play a major political role moving forward, giving him the lowest approval rating of his presidency at just 29%.Congressional Democrats aim to test McConnell’s approach – and his main lever of power, the filibuster – with their first legislation, which would expand voting rights and reform campaign finance.The so-called For The People Act, which passed the house in 2019, aims to tackle gerrymandering, “dark money” donations, and expand voting rights through initiatives such as a national voter registration system. If McConnell filibusters the bill, there will be immediate pressure for Democrats to abolish the filibuster through a change in the Senate rules requiring 51 votes.Senator Jeff Merkley, the Oregon Democrat who has introduced the new bill, said: “Each and every one of us takes an oath to protect and defend the constitution. There’s nothing more fundamental than the ability to vote. That should not be subject to a veto by McConnell. If he exercises a veto, it will cause everyone to figure out how to honor their oath to the constitution that requires us to pass this legislation.”Merkley believes that Democrats can achieve a lot in Congress by using budget reconciliation rules that allow taxing and spending legislation – including climate-related policies – by simple majority votes. But policy changes such as immigration reform will need 60 votes to overcome a likely Republican filibuster, and Merkley expects McConnell to continue with his approach from the Obama years.“I think McConnell is deeply wedded to the strategy of delay and obstruction,” he said. “It has been his fundamental theory of power that if you show the majority in place isn’t getting the job done, it strengthens your case to replace them.”In two years, one-third of the Senate will be up for re-election, representing the class of 2016, when Trump won the presidency, and the senators at risk are overwhelmingly Republican – including Republicans from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where Biden won last year.The historical trend is clear: the president’s party tends to lose seats in the first mid-term congressional elections. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump all lost control of the House in their first mid-terms. The one president who bucked the trend was George W Bush, in the first elections after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.It’s unclear how the domestic terrorism threat of white supremacist groups – and this month’s insurrection at Capitol Hill – will play out in the next several months, as Trump’s second impeachment trial begins and federal investigations continue to unfold with criminal prosecutions across the country.“The congressional Republican party in the House and the Senate are going to have to be very careful about how they choose to obstruct and govern in the aftermath of the insurrection at the hands of the president they refused to stand up to,” said Benenson. “They could get labeled as complicit with the leaders of the worse episode we have seen since the civil war. They have to be mindful of that.” More

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      in US Politics

      Trump to issue more than 100 pardons before Biden sworn in – reports

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      Donald Trump is expected to issue more than 100 presidential pardons on Tuesday, during his final hours in the White House, but may not pardon himself or his immediate family, it was reported on Monday.White House officials say Trump has privately debated with aides whether he should take the extraordinary step of pardoning himself. Some administration insiders have reportedly warned against it, arguing that it would make Trump look guilty.On Sunday, Trump met his son-in-law Jared Kushner, daughter Ivanka Trump and senior advisers to thrash out a lengthy list of pardon requests, the Washington Post reported. The meeting took up much of the day. The president was personally engaged with the details of every case, it said.Some scholars believe a self-pardon would go against the US constitution, since it violates the basic principle that nobody should be able to judge their own case. But the issue has never been tested.The White House discussions took place against the backdrop of a looming Senate impeachment trial, after the storming on 6 January by a pro-Trump mob of the US Capitol building. If convicted, Trump could be disqualified from running again for the presidency in 2024.Out of office, Trump will also be vulnerable to prosecution from federal and state authorities over his actions in office and regarding his business empire.It is not clear whether Trump will act to pardon members of his inner circle including Steve Bannon, who has been charged with defrauding individuals who donated to a wall project on the US-Mexico border. Another possible name is Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, who led attempts to overturn the result of November’s election. Trump and Giuliani are said to have fallen out over unpaid legal bills.CNN reported on Monday that the final batch of clemency actions was expected to feature criminal justice reform-minded pardons as well as more controversial ones for allies and friends. Lobbyists have been pushing for months to include their clients on Trump’s valedictory list.“Everything is a transaction. He likes pardons because it is unilateral. And he likes doing favours for people he thinks will owe him,” one source familiar with the matter told CNN, adding that Trump wanted to help people who could in turn help him in his post-White House career.Dr Salomon Melgen, a prominent eye doctor from Palm Beach who is in prison after being convicted on dozens of counts of healthcare fraud, is expected to be on the clemency list, CNN said.Presidential pardons do not imply innocence – a fact President Gerald Ford clung to in the face of lasting opprobrium for his pardon of Richard Nixon, his predecessor who resigned in disgrace in 1974, over the Watergate scandal.Last-ditch pardons and acts of clemency are common as presidencies come to a close. Infamously, in 2001, Bill Clinton pardoned the fugitive financier Marc Rich on his last day in the White House.In an analysis of Trump’s pardons, the blog Lawfare concluded: “The clemency system is dominated by insider access to the president and almost exclusively serves the president’s personal and political goals and whims.”On Sunday the New York Times reported on intensive lobbying for pardons as the Trump era draws to a close. Among startling details, an unnamed associate of Giuliani reportedly told an ex-CIA officer a pardon was “going to cost $2m”.Participants in the Capitol riot have appealed directly – via television or their lawyers – for pardons from Trump. On Sunday Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a key Trump ally, appealed to the president directly, telling him not to pardon anyone associated with the attack.“There are a lot of people urging the president to pardon the folks who participated in defiling the Capitol, the rioters,” he told Fox Business.“I don’t care if you went there and spread flowers on the floor. You breached the security of the Capitol. You interrupted a joint session of Congress. You tried to intimidate us all. You should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and to seek a pardon of these people would be wrong. I think it would destroy President Trump, and I hope we don’t go down that road.”Trump has already given pardons to 94 people, most to prominent figures caught up in the investigation by special prosecutor Robert Mueller into conspiracy with Russia. They include Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, longtime crony Roger Stone and ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn, who admitted lying to the FBI.US news organisations said the clemencies were expected to be issued on Trump’s last full day in office on Tuesday. Skipping the inauguration of the president-elect, Joe Biden, Trump leaves on Wednesday morning to begin his post-presidency at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. His presidency ends at noon on Wednesday. More

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      Billionaire backer feels 'deceived' by Josh Hawley over election objections

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      A secretive billionaire supporter of Josh Hawley and other rightwing lawmakers suggested he had been “deceived” by the Republican senator from Missouri, who led the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.Jeffrey Yass is a co-founder of Susquehanna International Group – headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a critical swing state – who has donated tens of millions of dollars to hardline Republican groups who supported Donald Trump’s effort to invalidate his defeat at the polls by Joe Biden.Yass privately told a longtime associate he had not foreseen how his contributions would lead to attempts to overturn US democracy.“Do you think anyone knew Hawley was going to do that?” Yass wrote to Laura Goldman, a former stockbroker who has known him for more than three decades.“Sometimes politicians deceive their donors.”Yass, who does not give interviews and generally avoids publicity, also told Goldman he did not believe the 2020 election had been “stolen”, even though he has directly and indirectly supported rightwing Republicans who have repeatedly – and falsely – sought to discredit the results.The latest fallout of the 6 January attempt to invalidate the election, in which 147 Republicans in Congress objected to electoral college results in the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol, comes as both Hawley and his donors face pressure and criticism for his role.Hawley has said he objected to the counting of electoral votes in order to instigate a “debate” on the issue of election integrity. He has denied that his actions helped to incite the violent outburst and breach of the Capitol in which five people died, including a police officer.Goldman told the Guardian she emailed Yass because she was upset to learn about his support for Hawley and other Republicans, especially since the lawmakers were seeking to invalidate the election results in their home state, Pennsylvania, which helped Biden clinch the White House.“I approached Jeff Yass upset after reading the Guardian’s article [about his involvement in donations] because I was shocked he would allow my vote and the vote of his neighbors to possibly be invalidated by politicians to whom he gives millions of dollars,” she said.She added: “Yass lives here. He knows local politicians … he could simply call them and ask questions if he thought the election results were funky, which they absolutely were not. He doesn’t need Josh Hawley, a senator from Missouri, or Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas, to question the election results in the state that he has lived almost 40 years.”Goldman published snippets of Yass’s private remarks to her on Twitter. The Guardian was able to verify the authenticity of the statements.Yass, a trader and poker aficionado who is an active Republican donor and has been a force in Pennsylvania elections, donated about $30m to conservative Super Pacs in the 2020 election cycle, making him the eighth-largest donor in the election, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.Most of those donations were made to the Club for Growth, an anti-tax group that in 2018 and 2020 supported 42 Republican hardliners who ultimately voted to overturn election results even after insurrectionists stormed the US Capitol.The Club for Growth has been a major back of both Hawley and Cruz, his partner in seeking to invalidate the election.Yass has not responded to requests for comment from the Guardian. Nor has he responded to questions about whether he will continue to donate to the Club for Growth or whether he discussed issues with Hawley and others. Goldman said she sought out a discussion with him in part because she knows he is a “hands on” political donor.The Club for Growth did not respond to a request for comment. The group’s president, David McIntosh, has been an avid supporter of some of most anti-democratic lawmakers elected in 2020, including Lauren Boebert, a QAnon follower and gun rights advocate from Colorado who has been criticized for tweeting the location of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, during the riot in the Capitol, against the advice of police.In an endorsement of Boebert in July 2020, McIntosh lauded the the restaurant owner and political novice for her understanding of the “irreparable harm” caused by “government overreach” and said he had no doubt Boebert would be a “conservative firebrand” in Washington.Yass told Goldman he donated to the Club for Growth a year ago and suggested he could not have anticipated what Hawley and others might do.But public records show Yass also donated $2.5m to the Protect Freedom Pac on 10 November 2020, a week after the US election. The Protect Freedom Pac, affiliated with the Kentucky Republican senator Rand Paul, ran advertisements against Democrats ahead of two January runoff elections in Georgia, including ads that claimed Democrats were seeking to defund the police, institute “socialist healthcare” and raise “trillions in new taxes”.The Protect Freedom Pac’s website currently – and falsely – states that Democrats “stole” the 2020 election and used the Covid-19 crisis to illegally change election laws. It has also endorsed an in-person voter ID law, a policy that would disproportionately block minority voters.Yass has received far less attention than other billionaire donors, such as Mike Bloomberg or the late Sheldon Adelson, but has been known to get involved in local politics, donating money to candidates who support charter schools.Goldman told the Guardian Yass has been a longtime supporter of the Republican majority in the Pennsylvania legislature that led the fight to stop mail-in ballots from being counted until election day. Pennsylvania’s final results were not known until days after the election and Biden’s victory was clinched in large part because of hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots that were counted after in-person ballots.Hawley’s office did not respond to a request for comment. More