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      George Santos: a creature of Congress, Citizens United and limitless Republican hypocrisy | Sidney Blumenthal

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      It seems churlish for any member of the party of Donald Trump to single out George Santos for punishment as a liar, fraudster and fabulist. The 23 federal charges against the first-term member of Congress pale beside the Republican frontrunner’s 91 felony counts and civil suits over fraud and E Jean Carroll’s defamation claim, based on her allegation of rape. Republicans’ faux horror at the discovery of Santos’s extravagant spending of campaign funds on Botox, casino chips and OnlyFans porn belies their previous blithe tolerance of the red-dressed, gay-pride, Brazilian drag queen in their midst. Santos thrived as the symbol of the cultural contradictions of Republicanism. Did his sophisticated taste for accessories from Hermès and Ferragamo finally do him in with his anti-globalist colleagues?The facts of Santos’s false identity were pried apart gradually, beginning before he was even sworn in. Slowly, his crimes were revealed. Exposé after exposé – yet nothing happened. So long as Santos voted as a reliable Republican (100% Heritage Action rating), he was shielded from ritual rounds of queer bashing, much less expulsion. The narrow Republican majority in the House of Representatives required every able-bodied member who could hold up an arm. Santos was straight as a party liner.Only when the stories of Santos’s lifetime of fraud became a rushing torrent did Kevin McCarthy, then speaker, refer the question to the ethics committee. There, it stayed bottled up. Republicans were always reluctant to excise Santos. His fate was entangled in the foul politics of the House.Only after McCarthy was deposed by an ultra-right cabal, and three prospective speakers chosen by a majority went down to defeat before Mike Johnson was elected, was an ethics report released and the expulsion of Santos brought up. It was a case of the first time as farce and the second, third and fourth times as farce, to be followed by the most comical farce of all.The day the Republican chair of the ethics committee introduced a motion to expel poor George, a leak from the forthcoming memoir of Liz Cheney – purged from her leadership post in the Republican conference in 2021, scourged for opposing Trump’s attempted overthrow of the US government, defeated in a vicious primary in 2022 – revealed that Santos was hardly among the most risible prevaricators in the House. McCarthy had explained to Cheney that he went on his humiliating visit to Trump at Mar-a-Lago a mere three weeks after the January 6 insurrection out of pity, because he felt bad that Trump was “depressed”.“He’s not eating,” said McCarthy. This excuse from the supreme sycophant – “My Kevin,” Trump called him – was as likely as Trump not violating the constitution’s emoluments clause to enrich himself. The only plausible reason for Trump not eating would be because there was a double cheeseburger already lodged in his gullet.Then the Washington Post reported that several weeks after McCarthy’s fall, he had a troubling call with Trump, who informed him why he had been the not-so-hidden hand behind his ouster. McCarthy, Trump explained, had not expunged Trump’s two impeachments and endorsed him for 2024. McCarthy’s pilgrimage to Trump in early 2021, which made Trump’s revenge tour possible, had gained him no credit. As speaker, McCarthy had immense control over the spigot of Republican money and the influence that flows from it. If he had decided to ignore Trump’s threats and cut him off, Trump would have been severely disabled. But McCarthy revived the monster, so the monster in turn could strangle him. At long last, too late, McCarthy said to Trump: “Fuck you.”The newly installed speaker, Mike Johnson, declares himself divinely anointed. (Does that make Matt Gaetz the hand of God?) “I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority,” he said, in his inaugural speech. Johnson extended his omniscience about the Lord’s blessing to every other member of the House. “He raised up each of you. All of us.” Presumably, the elect included Santos.When it came to a vote to expel Santos, Johnson recoiled. He had “real reservations”. He would not apply the whip. Members could “vote their conscience”. As for himself, he said he was “concerned about a precedent that may be set for that”. In 2022, Johnson sponsored the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act, that would ban teaching “concepts like masturbation, pornography, sexual acts, and gender transition”, and prohibit “federal grants to host and promote sexually oriented events like drag queen story hours and burlesque shows”. Now, he would allow members to consider forgiveness for the sinner’s financial crimes, in “good faith”.Johnson might well cite Matthew 7:1: “Judge not, that ye not be judged.” His own financial disclosure forms since he was a state legislator in Louisiana and as a member of the House are extraordinarily sketchy. He claimed he did not have a bank account. But as a legislator he had a contract to bill the state $400,000 to defend a law he sponsored to restrict abortion clinic access. In 2015 his financial disclosure form showed he cleared tens of thousands from religious right organizations: Freedom Guard, a legal operation; Living Waters Publications, a Christian publishing house that offered “biblical evangelism training camps”; Louisiana Right to Life; Louisiana Freedom Forum; and the Providence Classical Academy ($5,000-$24,999), “part-time”.The House ethics committee report on Santos buried within it a document compiled by his own campaign before the election in 2022 that detailed many lies and frauds later exposed. He and his campaign, as well as the National Republican Congressional Committee, were apparently all cognizant of the fraud from the start. Exhibit six of the ethics committee report consists of the 141-page “George Santos Vulnerability Report”, a point-by-point description of fake college degrees, Ponzi schemes, fraudster firms, scams, multiple civil judgments for cheating creditors, evictions and incident after incident of questionable behavior.The “vulnerability report” also chronicled Santos’s evolving story of his grandparents, from Belgian migrants who “fled the devastation of world war II Europe” into “Holocaust refugees”. This was the first falsehood about his background disclosed by the media, by CNN a week after his election. His fabrication of his identity, down to hiding his real given name (“George Devolder”) was an act of brazen and clumsy thievery he got away with to get into office with the aid of complicit campaign handlers.Santos’s conception, in a larger sense, came with the demise of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), commonly known as McCain-Feingold. Trashing that law created a world of dark money campaign contributions where almost anything goes. Santos’s spree was a byproduct of the post-campaign finance reform era. If he had only consulted an attorney to show him where the few remaining fine lines were, he could have gratified much of his urge for grift and glitz while avoiding indictment.Santos’s godparents in this respect were the Kentucky Republican senator Mitch McConnell, who worked for decades to torpedo reform, and the conservative justices of the supreme court, whose ruling sank McCain-Feingold. McConnell sought to forge a political empire built on unregulated corporate cash. He grasped that the keys to his kingdom would be held by the courts. So, as Senate majority leader, he frustrated reform legislation and packed the courts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt took some doing but finally, in 2010, Anthony Kennedy, in his majority opinion in the Citizens United case, struck down the crucial sections of the BCRA. Corporations now had the untrammeled right to spend as much as they wanted in campaigns and certain non-profit organizations did not have to disclose their donors. With a flourish of naive certainty, Kennedy stated: “Ingratiation and access, in any event, are not corruption.” The chief justice, John Roberts, echoed that view in his ruling in the 2022 case, SEC v Cruz, in which he decided that a candidate, here the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz, could raise money after an election to pay campaign debts. With equally trusting innocence, Roberts wrote: “The government has not shown that [the law] furthers a permissible anticorruption goal, rather than the impermissible objective of simply limiting the amount of money in politics.”The sluice gates of dark money opened. From the multibillion-dollar operation of Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society to enact the conservative agenda through domination of the courts, the legal corruption trickled down. The gutting of the campaign finance law unleashed a frenzied atmosphere in which fraudsters like Santos could feel unrestrained. His wild ride was not directly related to the letter of the Citizens United decision, but to its reckless spirit.Then came Santos’s crash. Nobody offered more cogent analysis of his Republican colleagues’ sudden aversion to him than Santos himself.“I was, as we joke around a lot in my circles, we’re like, ‘Oh my God you were the ‘It Girl.’ Everybody wanted you.’ Until nobody wanted me.”He was stigmatized, as a sinner in a den of sinners. “Within the ranks of the United States Congress there’s felons galore,” he said. His casting out reminded him of a character from the Bible. “There’s people with all sorts of sheisty backgrounds and all of a sudden George Santos is the Mary Magdalene of the United States Congress.” Reviled now as a prostitute, he has faith he will be canonized as a saint. Expulsion means never having to say you’re sorry.Expelling Santos cannot unwind that he was let into the House to witness what happened behind the scenes. His Republican colleagues, he said, are “more worried about getting drunk every night with the next lobbyist that they’re going to screw –and pretend like none of us know what’s going on”. He held a press conference to warn, “If the House wants to start different precedent and expel me, that is going to be the undoing of a lot of members of this body because this will haunt them in their future.”Perhaps George Santos has been divinely sent, a messenger to expose hypocrisy. God is not finished with him yet. We await the tell-all memoir and the Netflix series.
      Sidney Blumenthal is a Guardian columnist and author of The Permanent Campaign, published in 1980, and All the Power of the Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1856-1860, the third of a projected five volumes. He is the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton More

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      George Santos makes final effort to resist vote to expel him from US House

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      George Santos appealed to democratic norms on Thursday in a last-ditch effort to resist an expected vote to expel him from the US House of Representatives, describing efforts to remove him as “bullying” and warning that “the undoing of a lot of members of this body” would follow.The embattled Republican congressman, who is facing a third effort to expel him from Congress with a House vote due on Friday, told reporters outside the US Capitol in Washington DC that it was “an unfortunate circumstance to watch Congress waste the American people’s time over and over again on something that is in the power of the people, not the power of Congress”.Following a congressional ethics report that alleged Santos had used campaign funds for personal gain, including spending on Botox, OnlyFans, which is commonly used to procure pornography, and designer brands such as Hermès, Santos said the move to expel him on the basis of an ethics report was a rejection of precedent.The report, he argued, was “littered” with hyperbole and opinion. “No decent cop would bring this to a prosecutor or a DA and say here’s our report, go ahead and charge him.”Santos has already been charged with 23 federal counts including conspiracy, wire fraud, false statements, falsification of records, aggravated identity theft and credit card fraud.Only five members of Congress have previously been expelled. Santos said that lawmakers were “trying to join him to three Confederates and two people convicted in a court of law”.Santos went on to slam Congress as a “house that doesn’t work for the people” and accused some fellow Republican lawmakers as people “with rap sheets who think and feel emboldened enough to call out other people”.On Thursday, New York’s Staten Island representative, Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican, told CNN: “The earth is round and George Santos should be expelled.”Republicans have a wafer-thin majority in the House, which will come under further pressure if Santos is expelled and a special election called in his New York district, which takes in a portion of New York City and Long Island.Malliotakis said of GOP control of the House: “Of course I’m concerned, but that should not be taken into account at the moment. The issue is, should this man be in Congress? He should not.” She further told CNN she thought due process, which some Republicans defending Santos’s place in Congress have said has not been sufficiently followed, had been fulfilled by the thorough ethics review in committee.But Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the House judiciary committee, told the rightwing outlet Newsmax that he was against expulsion, arguing the issue was between Santos and voters in his district. “That’s how our system works,” Jordan said to Newsmax.Earlier, Santos also said he would introduce a privileged motion to expel Jamaal Bowman, the Democratic New York representative, over an incident in which he set off a fire alarm during a vote, which the House ethics committee had opted not to investigate.“No one in Congress, or anywhere in America, takes soon-to-be former Congressman George Santos seriously. This is just another meaningless stunt in his long history of cons, antics, and outright fraud,” Bowman said in response.Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, told Axios on Thursday that a vote to expel Santos would now come on Friday. Santos has said that a vote today was “kind of not cool” since it was his second wedding anniversary.Johnson has said lawmakers should vote with their conscience, adding: “I, personally, have real reservations about doing this. I’m concerned about a precedent that may be set for that.”He continued: “I think [that] is the only appropriate thing we can do. We’ve not whipped the vote, and we wouldn’t. I trust that people will make that decision thoughtfully and in good faith.”Santos has previously described the effort to remove him as a “smear”. In a defiant speech on Tuesday, he hit back: “Are we to now assume that one is no longer innocent until proven guilty and they are, in fact, guilty until proven innocent?”If the move to to expel him is successful, the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, will have to call a special election within 10 days of Santos’s expulsion. More

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      George Santos rails against House expulsion efforts, launching tirade against Jamaal Bowman – video

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      Santos appeared to launch a veiled threat against House members who voted against his expulsion, saying it would ‘haunt them’.

      He also launched a tirade against New York Democratic representative Jamaal Bowman who was charged last month with setting off a false fire alarm in a House office building before a vote on a government funding bill. Bowman pleaded guilty and agreed to pay a fine of $1,000 (£792).

      The Republican speaker of the US House, Mike Johnson, said the chamber would vote on whether to expel George Santos on Thursday for embellishing his résumé and allegedly breaking federal law More

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      Henry Kissinger obituary

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      Henry Kissinger, who has died at the age of 100, was the most controversial US foreign policy practitioner of the last half-century, the architect of American detente with the Soviet Union, the orchestrator of Washington’s opening to communist China, the broker of the first peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, and the man who led the US team in the protracted talks with North Vietnam which resulted in US forces leaving Indochina after America’s longest foreign war.Feted for these accomplishments as national security adviser and later secretary of state under Richard Nixon, Kissinger achieved global celebrity status and in 1973 was awarded the Nobel peace prize. But it later emerged via leaked documents and tapes and former officials’ memoirs that behind his diplomatic skills and tireless energy as a negotiator there lurked an inordinate love of secrecy and manipulation and a ruthless desire to protect US national and corporate interests at any price. His contempt for human rights prompted him to ask the FBI to tap his own staff’s telephones and, more seriously, to give the nod to Indonesia’s military dictator for the invasion of East Timor, to condone the actions of the apartheid regime in South Africa in invading Angola, and to use the CIA to help topple the elected government of Chile.A formidable academic before he worked for the government, Kissinger reached greater heights of political influence than any previous immigrant to the US. His nasal German accent never left him, an eternal reminder to his adopted countrymen that he was a European by origin. To Kissinger himself, the fact that a man born outside the US, and a Jew to boot, could become its secretary of state was a never-ending source of pride.Although Kissinger was often seen as a supreme believer in a world order based on realpolitik and a balance of power, at heart he was ultra-loyal to the individualistic American ideal. In love with his adopted country, he was infused with a missionary zeal to maintain American hegemony in a shifting world.Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born to a comfortable, middle-class family in Fürth in Bavaria. His father, Louis, was a teacher, his mother, Paula (nee Stern), a housewife. As a boy, he was old enough to comprehend the collapse of their domestic stability when the Nazis came to power. He and his younger brother were beaten up on the way to school, and eventually expelled. His father lost his job. The family emigrated to New York in 1938.Kissinger rarely discussed his refugee past, and once told an interviewer to reject any psychoanalytical link between his views and his childhood, but some observers argued that his personal experience of nazism led to his horror of revolutionary changes as well as to the underlying pessimism of his analysis of world affairs.After George Washington high school in Manhattan, his accountancy course at the City College of New York was interrupted in 1943 when he was conscripted. He was with the US army in Germany for the Nazi surrender and the first months of occupation. He won a bronze star for his role in capturing Gestapo officers and saboteurs in Hanover. In 1946 he went to Harvard, where he stayed intermittently for the next quarter of a century. He received his PhD in 1954 with a study of the 19th-century European conservatives Metternich and Castlereagh, which he turned into a book entitled A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-1822 (1957).His subsequent studies led him to become a specialist on nuclear weapons, who caught the eye of Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York and a bastion of east coast liberal Republicanism. Kissinger’s desire for influence on policy was already leading him to spend time in Washington, and he combined his academic work with consultancies for various government departments and agencies, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council under Dwight Eisenhower.Kissinger’s patron, Rockefeller, failed to make much headway in the presidential campaigns of 1960 and 1964, but after Nixon won the presidency for the Republicans in 1968, Kissinger was appointed national security adviser, with an office in the White House. His intellectual drive, as well as geographical closeness to the president, allowed him to turn what had previously been a backroom job into a high-profile, decision-making post.Kissinger knew that access is power, and that the relationship goes both ways. Having the ear of the president gave him the ear of a competitive, news-hungry Washington press corps which admired his charm and brilliance and eagerly printed a generous amount of his on-the-record comments while finding ways to divulge unattributably the confidential titbits and insider gossip that he loved to drop.A battle developed between Kissinger and the secretary of state, William Rogers, the nominal architect of US foreign policy, during Nixon’s first term. Kissinger won it easily. Rogers was excluded not only from the administration’s central concerns – Vietnam, the Soviet Union and China – but even the Middle East, the one area where he achieved some praise in 1970 with the so-called Rogers plan. The plan was a US effort to impose a settlement between Egypt and Israel with the backing of the Soviet Union. Israel rejected it while Kissinger felt that the goal of US policy in the region, as indeed throughout the developing world, should be to reduce the Kremlin’s influence rather than give Moscow equal status.When Rogers eventually resigned a few months after the start of Nixon’s second term, Kissinger got the job he coveted most. Four years of private advice and back-channel negotiating were to be crowned by formal acceptance as Washington’s senior international representative and America’s major speechmaker on foreign affairs. Kissinger had already scored the two biggest coups of his career, proving that he was more than just an academic consultant and bureaucratic in-fighter, but a cunning negotiator. He ran the secret diplomacy which culminated in July 1971 with the stunning announcement that Nixon was to go to China to meet Mao Zedong the following year. He also led the negotiations in Paris with Hanoi for the peace treaty that sealed the departure of American troops from Vietnam. For the second of these feats, he shared the Nobel peace prize with Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese negotiator, though the latter refused to accept it.The award aroused a huge controversy since it coincided with revelations that Kissinger had supported Nixon’s decisions to mount a secret campaign of bombing Cambodia in 1969. Cambodia had long been used by North Vietnamese troops for bases and supply depots, but Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, resisted pleas from the joint chiefs of staff to bomb them. The country was officially neutral and its leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was desperately trying not to take sides.But the Nixon administration wanted to send a strong message to North Vietnam that the new president would be tougher than Johnson. Tapes of White House conversations (the Watergate tapes) revealed that Nixon called it the “madman theory” – “I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war,” he told his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman. Kissinger endorsed the concept, though he preferred to put it in more academic language by arguing that US policy must always retain an element of unpredictability.In March 1969 Nixon and Kissinger ignored the reluctance of Rogers and launched waves of B52s on carpet-bombing missions over Cambodia, as they had already done in Vietnam. The raids went on for 14 months, although officially the administration pretended the targets were all in South Vietnam. Initially, Kissinger did not even want the pilots to know they were striking Cambodia, but he was advised that they would soon find out and be more likely to leak the information unless sworn to secrecy ahead of the raids.The bombing remained secret in Washington for an astonishing four years, becoming public only when a military whistleblower wrote to Senator William Proxmire, a prominent critic of the Vietnam war, and urged him to investigate. In Cambodia the campaign led to an estimated 700,000 deaths as well as 2 million people being forced to flee their homes. It also led a pro-US army general, Lon Nol, to seize power from Sihanouk in 1970 and align the country with the US. The bombing and the coup fuelled popular unrest, added to the strength of Cambodia’s communist guerrillas, the Khmer Rouge, and paved their way to power in 1975.The Paris peace talks on Vietnam also coincided with an escalation of US bombing in Vietnam itself. At the height of the negotiations at the end of 1972, Nixon and Kissinger took the war to new heights with the “Christmas bombing” campaign, comprising targets across North Vietnam. It enraged the US peace movement and provoked a huge wave of new protests and draft-card burning by conscripts. Kissinger’s aim was not so much to intimidate Hanoi as to persuade Washington’s ally, South Vietnam’s president Nguyen Van Thieu, to accept the accords which the US was making with the North. The bombing was meant to assure him that if there were any North Vietnamese violations after the accords came into effect, they would be met with all-out American force.Kissinger was aware that the Paris deal was flawed, and might well lead to Thieu’s replacement by a communist government. His goal was merely to win a “decent interval” between the pull-out of US troops and the inevitable collapse of the regime in Saigon so that the US could escape any perception of defeat. The phrase “decent interval” appeared in the briefing papers for Kissinger’s secret trip to Beijing in 1971 that were later declassified. They show he told the Chinese that this was US strategy in Vietnam. A year later he informed China’s prime minister, Zhou Enlai: “If we can live with a communist government in China, we ought to be able to accept it in Indochina.”When the North Vietnamese army and its southern allies, the Vietcong, stormed into Saigon in April 1975, forcing the US ambassador into a humiliating helicopter escape, the image was clearly one of defeat, in spite of the two-year interval since the departure of most US troops. But Kissinger blamed Congress, claiming it had undermined the peace deal by refusing to finance new arms shipments to Thieu. This was a favourite refrain. He continually attacked Congress for interfering in foreign policy, apparently never recognising the value of democratic checks on strong executive power.Turning his skills to the Middle East, Kissinger gave birth to the concept of shuttle diplomacy, a term first used to the press by his close aide Joe Sisco. He flew between Jerusalem and Cairo during the October 1973 war to hammer out a ceasefire after the Israelis had sent their troops across the Suez canal and come close to the Egyptian capital. He later secured Israel’s withdrawal back across the canal, and shuttled to and from Damascus to make a deal with Syria for the Israelis to withdraw from a small part of the Golan Heights.Behind all three issues lay the American’s competition with the Soviet Union, then at the height of its international power. The US opening to China was designed to wrong-foot the Russians by turning what they thought was an evolving, bilateral relationship of parity and mutual respect with Washington into an unnerving triangle which seemed to ally China and the US against them. Kissinger hoped to exploit the two communist powers’ rivalry to persuade both of them to abandon the Vietnamese, thus making it easier for the US to win the peace, if not the war. So he threatened Moscow and Peking (now Beijing) with the argument that they would lose the benefits of dialogue and trade with Washington if they did not stop their arms supplies to Hanoi.In the Middle East, Kissinger’s aim was to exclude the Russians, who had been longtime allies of Egypt and Syria. By extracting concessions from Israel and brokering a ceasefire in the 1973 war, Kissinger persuaded Cairo and Damascus that only the US could achieve movement from the Israelis, thanks to its unique influence. A year before the war, Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, had shown his distrust of Moscow by asking thousands of Russian advisers to leave Egypt. The move was meant as a signal to Washington that Egypt preferred good relations with the US, provided Washington put pressure on Israel. Kissinger missed the signal and did nothing until Sadat, in desperation, launched his attack on Israel in October 1973.Kissinger’s strategy of detente with the Soviet Union was also designed to reduce Moscow’s room for manoeuvre. Although rightwing Republicans criticised it as appeasement, he argued that Washington should not just contain the Soviet Union, as previous American administrations had sought to do. The US should tame it by giving it a stake in the status quo. Instead of going for ad hoc deals with the Kremlin, Kissinger was the first senior American to try to establish a complex of agreements with a range of penalties and rewards for bad and good behaviour. This, he argued, would limit Soviet adventurism. Sometimes he called it a network, at other times a web, but in both cases the aim was to provide the Soviet Union with benefits from expanded trade, investment and political consultation with Washington.The strategy failed to produce a new world order because Kissinger was not willing to abandon adventurism on the American side. In the developing world, in particular, Kissinger pursued policies of confrontation with Moscow, often based on faulty analysis of what the Russians were doing or exaggerated claims of the extent of their influence. The successful US effort to overthrow the elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, in 1973 fitted into the long US history of intervening in Latin America against leftwing governments that nationalised US corporations (in this case, the big copper companies). But Kissinger also disliked Allende’s closeness to Moscow’s ally, Cuba. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” he commented.By 1974 Kissinger’s boss was being engulfed by the Watergate scandal. Although Kissinger was involved in secretly taping his own staff, he was not connected to Nixon’s decision to burgle the headquarters of the Democratic party at the Watergate apartment complex in 1972 and then cover up the truth – the charges that brought the president down. In spite of the scandal – or perhaps because of it – Nixon’s relationship with Kissinger remained close, in large part because the beleaguered president saw Kissinger as his best ally in foreign policy, the area where Nixon felt that he had been most successful. He wanted Kissinger to be the man to preserve his legacy.In his memoirs, Kissinger described how Nixon virtually clung to him during his last hours in the White House in August 1974. The disgraced president asked him to pray beside him in the Lincoln bedroom for half an hour. “Nixon’s recollection is that he invited me to kneel with him and that I did so. My own recollection is less clear on whether I actually knelt. It is a trivial distinction. In whatever posture, I was filled with a deep sense of awe,” Kissinger wrote.Although Kissinger was not charged over Watergate, his image nonetheless became tarnished. Damaged by revelations of the secret bombing of Cambodia, the favourable media bubble burst. Kissinger’s path from miracle worker to being perceived as a cynical trickster proved short. If Nixon was a serial liar on the domestic stage, Kissinger was seen as a similar villain on the international one. Nevertheless the next president, Gerald Ford, who had limited foreign experience, kept Kissinger on as secretary of state as a symbol of continuity. But Kissinger’s star was in decline. He tried to change his focus by shifting his attention to Africa, which he had ignored until then.His results were far from positive. He may well have set back the fall of apartheid by several years by approving the involvement of the CIA in the Angolan civil war and giving the nod to South Africa’s invasion in 1975 as the Portuguese withdrew from their erstwhile colony and granted it independence. The South African intervention prompted Cuba to send hundreds of troops to support the Angolan government, thereby launching one of the bloodiest “proxy wars” between the superpowers.When the Republicans lost the White House to the Democrats under Jimmy Carter in 1976, Kissinger’s time was up. He spent the next decades as a consultant to multinational corporations, and speaking on the international lecture circuit. In 1982 he founded his own firm, Kissinger Associates.Although he had brief hopes of a comeback when Ronald Reagan won the 1980 election, the new president and his men did not feel comfortable with Kissinger’s image or the strength of his personality. His public persona of pragmatism did not fit their crusading ideology of anti-communism and their constant claims of Soviet expansionism. They were from the school which felt his contacts with the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, during the period of detente, had smacked of appeasement.The charge was absurd. It reflected the difference between subtlety and simplicity, as I discovered at one of the occasional deep-background “non-lunches” which Kissinger gave for representatives of European newspapers. Europe was never a high priority for Kissinger, in large part because it was not a region of US-Soviet competition. He favoured a strong and united western Europe so as to keep Germany in check, hence his one much-quoted comment: “If I want to call Europe, who do I call?”But he seemed to like meeting European correspondents, flattering us with the sense that we asked deeper questions than our American colleagues. At one such lunch, I was staggered by Kissinger’s emotional outburst when someone delicately raised the appeasement charge that rightwing senators were making. “Do you really think a man who stopped Allende wouldn’t want to stop Brezhnev?” he retorted.If ever there was an American super-patriot, it was Kissinger. As a European intellectual, he knew better than his adopted compatriots how to run an empire. The bedrock of his policies was fear of a resurgent, “unanchored” Germany, a firm desire to keep western Europe closely tied to the US, and a fierce determination to outwit the Soviet Union and maintain American dominance, if necessary through the use of military might. It was no surprise that in his 80s, long after the Soviet Union had collapsed, he became a close consultant of George W Bush, supporting his invasion of Iraq.Kissinger’s private life was a tempestuous subject in the Washington gossip columns, at least in the interval between his two marriages, which happened to coincide with his years at the apex of power. His first, to Ann Fleischer, with whom he had two children, Elizabeth and David, ended in divorce in 1964. Ten years later, he married Nancy Maginnes, one of his former researchers. She and his children survive him. More

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      Biden hails job creation and mocks Lauren Boebert for dismissing investment as ‘massive failure’ – US politics live

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      Joe Biden just took the stage in Pueblo, Colorado, where he’s speaking about how his administration has helped businesses like CS Wind, a turbine manufacturer, shift jobs back to the United States.“People seeing this on television may not be certain they used to make all their wind towers abroad,” the president said. “Then they decided to make them here in America as well. Today the CS Wing factory in Colorado is the largest wind turbine manufacturer in the entire world … has over 170 employees. As I said for a long time when I think climate, I mean this sincerely, I think jobs, jobs.”Hello, US politics live blog readers, it’s been a lively day – and week so far – for news and there will be more action on Thursday as the House is due to vote on whether to expel New York Republican congressman George Santos. Do join us again then but, for now, this blog is closing. The Guardian’s global live blog on the war between Israel and Hamas continues, meanwhile, and you can follow it here.How the day went:
      Joe Biden attacked rightwing Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert as one of the “leaders of this extreme Maga movement”, upon visiting her district in Colorado to promote a factory there building equipment for offshore wind energy plants.
      The president spoke in Pueblo about how his administration has helped businesses like CS Wind, a turbine manufacturer, shift jobs back to the United States.
      Marjorie Taylor Greene, a leader of the far-right GOP bloc in the House, proposed once again that Congress should impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, homeland security secretary, for his handling of the US-Mexico border and migration.
      Republican House speaker Mike Johnson said the chamber will vote on whether to expel George Santos on Thursday, and he is leaving it up to lawmakers to decide whether the New York congressman should be removed from office for embellishing his résumé and allegedly breaking federal law.
      George Santos struck a defiant tone after House Democrats introduced a motion on Tuesday to expel him from Congress, insisting in a speech that he would not resign and saying to reporters “I don’t care” about the campaign against him.
      Joe Biden said that raising $440bn over 10 years through his billionaire’s tax policy would strengthen programs such as social security and Medicare.“Just by paying 25% instead of 8%. Imagine what we could do if we made billionaires pay their taxes like everyone else,” he said, during his speech in Colorado moments ago.“We could strengthen the social security and Medicare systems, instead of cutting them like … Trump and Boebert want to do,” he said.He said the extra revenue would help with government subsidies for childcare and senior care costs.“This is not about help for poor folks, this is about smart economics,” he said. And such assistance allowed more carers to go out to work, generating economic growth, he said.The president closed out his speech without any further digs at his Republican thorns, and has now departed the stage.Joe Biden is touting his billionaire’s minimum tax policy and decrying that rightwing congresswoman Lauren Boebert, whose district he’s visiting in Colorado, and her ilk only want to cut taxes for the richest.He said that prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, there were 750 billionaires in the US and “now there are 1,000” and typically, the president said, they pay income tax at 8%.“Raise your hands if you pay more than 8%” Biden told the crowd, as a sea of hands were raised.“That’s less than firefighters and teachers pay,” he said.Biden said he wants a 25% tax for billionaires, projecting that would raise $440bn in revenue for the US over a decade.He also complained about giant corporations paying no taxes on huge profits. “If anyone thinks the tax code is fair, raise your hand,” he said.As he promoted the Inflation Reduction Act and other policies he said are helping communities across the country, Joe Biden singled out for criticsm Lauren Boebert, the rightwing congresswoman who represents the district containing Pueblo, Colorado, where he’s speaking.“The historic investments we’re celebrating today is in Congresswoman Boebert’s district,” the president said.“She’s one of the leaders of this extreme Maga movement. She, along with every single Republican colleague, voted against the law that made these investments in jobs possible. That’s not hyperbole. It’s a fact. And then she voted to repeal key parts of this loan. And she called this law, ‘a massive failure’. You all know you’re part of a massive failure?”He then took credit for companies in Colorado hiring thanks to his administration, and asked the audience: “None of that sounds like a massive failure to me. How about you?”Joe Biden just took the stage in Pueblo, Colorado, where he’s speaking about how his administration has helped businesses like CS Wind, a turbine manufacturer, shift jobs back to the United States.“People seeing this on television may not be certain they used to make all their wind towers abroad,” the president said. “Then they decided to make them here in America as well. Today the CS Wing factory in Colorado is the largest wind turbine manufacturer in the entire world … has over 170 employees. As I said for a long time when I think climate, I mean this sincerely, I think jobs, jobs.”Speaking of international engagements, US prosecutors have accused an agent of India’s government of directing an attempted assassination of a Sikh activist on US soil. A similar accusation by Canada has led to a diplomatic spat with New Delhi, and the indictment from US prosecutors could complicate the Biden administration’s resolve to work with Narendra Modi’s government to build alliances against China. The Guardian’s Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Leyland Cecco are on the story:US prosecutors have accused an agent of the Indian government of directing the attempted assassination of an American citizen on US soil, according to a superseding indictment released by the Department of Justice, which revealed new details about India’s alleged targeting of Sikh activists around the world.The indictment made public on Wednesday also provided new evidence that the Indian agent – who is not named – ordered the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Sikh activist who was shot dead outside a Sikh temple in British Columbia in June.The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, announced in September that there were “credible allegations” that agents of the Indian government had carried out the assassination of Nijjar. The allegations were denied by India, which called the claim “absurd” and politically motivated.The US indictment now appears to confirm, however, evidence of a global plot allegedly orchestrated in India to silence and kill vocal critics of the Indian government who support the creation of an independent Sikh state.Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the target of the alleged assassination plot, told the Guardian that the indictment revealed a “blatant case of India’s transnational terrorism” – adding that the attempt on his life had only galvanized his efforts to pursue a symbolic referendum on an independent Sikh homeland, known as Khalistan.“If death is the cost for running the Khalistan referendum, I am willing to pay that price,” he said in a statement. “First by assassinating Nijjar in Canada and then attempting to assassinate me on US soil, India under [prime minister Narendra Modi] has extended to the foreign soils its policy of violently crushing the Sikhs movement for right to self-determination.”The White House has meanwhile confirmed that Kamala Harris will travel to Dubai on 1 and 2 December to represent the United States at the Cop28 conference on fighting climate change.“Throughout her engagements, the vice-president will underscore the Biden-Harris Administration’s success in delivering on the most ambitious climate agenda in history, both at home and abroad. The vice-president will be joined by dozens of senior US officials representing more than 20 US departments and agencies,” Harris’s press secretary Kirsten Allen said in a statement.Biden was expected to go, but canceled his travel plans earlier this week:The man who nearly booted Lauren Boebert from office last year – and could succeed next year – is Adam Frisch, a Democrat and former council member in resort town Aspen. The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly spoke to him last October about why he thinks voters in his western Colorado district are ready for change:Adam Frisch is in his second congressional campaign, crossing and re-crossing Colorado’s third US House district, a space bigger than Pennsylvania. Thirteen months out from election day, time is one thing he does not lack. But Frisch has a unique way of counting it anyway: before and after Beetlejuice.“Before Beetlejuice,” the Democrat says, of polling in his Republican-leaning district, “we were up by two points, Trump was up five.”After Beetlejuice, the thinking goes, Frisch’s position may well improve further.Frisch, 56 and a former banker who now lives in Aspen, is the Democratic candidate to challenge Lauren Boebert next year. Boebert, a former restaurant owner and proud grandmother at 36, is the far-right Republican who won the seat in 2020 and has proven relentlessly controversial since – so much so that last year, even in a conservative district, she survived Frisch’s first challenge by the skin of her teeth.Boebert won after a recount, by just 546 votes, then went back to Washington DC to stoke the usual fires.But last month a bigger blaze flared up, when the congresswoman was shown to have behaved outrageously during a performance of the musical Beetlejuice in Denver.On security footage, Boebert sang and danced, took selfies, vaped and even appeared to grope her date as he fondled her in return. Both were ejected. For once, Boebert voiced something close to contrition. But to Frisch, the episode was just further proof that Boebert is there to be beaten.“We’re resonating with a lot of people,” he said, by phone, during another day of meeting and greeting.“In February of 22, when I first launched, there were two themes I started to work on. The Republicans laughed at me, the Democrats laughed at me, the media and the donor class laughed. But the themes are the people want the circus to stop, and they want someone to focus on the district.“And every day since then, [Boebert] has just been one of the national leaders of the circus. And obviously, it’s just gotten worse and worse … it’s just a mess and people are sick and tired.”Joe Biden arrived in Colorado yesterday, and spoke at a campaign reception where he made a point to criticize Lauren Boebert, the far-right Republican whose district he is visiting today.The president’s itinerary will bring him to a wind turbine factory and see him tout his administration’s renewable energy investments, but its also a direct confrontation to Boebert, who barely won re-election in her district last year despite its Republican tilt, and is expected to face a tough race next year.“With the progress we’ve made, we haven’t gotten a whole lot of help from the other side. Tomorrow, we’re going to be in … Congresswoman Lauren Boebert’s district … one of the leaders of the extreme right, the Maga movement,” Biden told guests at the fundraiser.He continued:
      We’re going to a wind energy company that plans to invest an additional $200m to expand the facility in Colorado, double its production, add 850 new jobs – good-paying jobs, the governor will tell you. But the congresswoman, along with every single one of her Republican colleagues, voted against the law I signed that made these investments possible. And then she vowed to repeal it. And she voted to repeal it, and she called it a massive failure. It’s in her district. She called it a massive failure.
      And she went on and voted against the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. She called it garbage. It’s building bridges, roads, Internet, et cetera. And she called it a scam. I find it pretty unbelievable.
      Joe Biden will promote his economic and clean energy policies this afternoon in Colorado, while taking on rightwing Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert, a close ally of former president Donald Trump, Reuters reports.Biden, who blamed Trump at a fundraising event in Denver on Tuesday for taking away US women’s right to an abortion, will visit a wind tower manufacturer in Pueblo, part of Boebert’s congressional district.Biden has presided over a stronger-than-expected US economy and big federal investments in infrastructure and clean energy, but the clean energy industry is now struggling with high costs.Facing weak opinion polls, Biden has turned in his re-election campaign to more directly taking on Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, as unfit for the presidency and a threat to American democracy.Boebert, whom the White House calls a “self-described Maga Republican”, referencing Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda, is expected to become a default target for those attacks today.Boebert faces a tough re-election battle herself against Democrat Adam Frisch, who has out-raised her in donations.During his visit, Biden will speak about clean energy investments and “highlight how self-described Maga Republicans like Representative Lauren Boebert are threatening those investments, jobs, and opportunities,” the White House said.Biden set a goal of deploying 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind along US coastlines this decade to fight climate change.That may be unattainable due to soaring costs and supply chain delays, Reuters reported in September.Former president Donald Trump’s lawyers have suggested their strategy in his election interference case in Washington involves distancing him from the horde of US Capitol rioters, whom he has embraced on the campaign trail, the Associated Press reports.Special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal investigation team has signaled it will make the case Trump is responsible for the chaos that unfolded on January 6, 2021, and point to the Republican ex-president’s continued support of the rioters, in order to help establish his criminal intent.The competing arguments highlight the extent to which the insurrection will inevitably form the backdrop in a landmark trial set to begin March 4 in a courthouse just blocks from the Capitol.Trump’s defense attorneys failed in an effort to strike references to that day’s violence from the indictment but have made clear their strategy involves distancing the former president from the horde of rioters, whom they describe as “independent actors at the Capitol”.While Trump’s glorification of January 6 defendants, who have been arrested and charged by the hundreds, may boost him politically as he vies to retake the White House in 2024, his lawyers’ approach lays bare a concern that arguments linking him to the rioters could harm him in front of a jury.Much may depend as well on the evidence permitted by federal judge Tanya Chutkan.It’s impeachment season among House Republicans. Their leadership is pressing forward with their campaign to impeach Joe Biden for alleged corruption, while rightwing lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene has proposed a resolution to impeach homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, though the chamber turned down a similar attempt just a few weeks ago. The clock is also ticking down for George Santos, the New York congressman and admitted fabulist. House speaker Mike Johnson said the chamber will vote tomorrow on expelling him, and reports indicate the support is there to kick him out of office.Here’s what else is going on today:
      House Democrats say the GOP is doing Donald Trump’s bidding with its impeachment inquiry into Biden.
      Mourners gathered in Plains, Georgia for the funeral of former first Rosalynn Carter. Her husband Jimmy Carter was in attendance.
      Mike Pence’s son played a role in convincing his father to stand up to Trump on January 6, according to a report.
      In Georgia, mourners are attending the funeral of former first lady Rosalynn Carter, including her husband Jimmy Carter:Joe and Jill Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Melania Trump and Michelle Obama were among the dignitaries who traveled to Atlanta yesterday for a tribute to Carter, a noted advocate for mental health and the eradication of diseases worldwide:On the House floor, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a leader of the far-right GOP bloc, again proposed impeaching Alejandro Mayorkas for his handling of security at the southern border and the inflow of migrants into the United States:Republicans have made Mayorkas into the public face of what they call the “Biden Border Crisis”, and earlier this year were mulling impeaching the secretary. However, impeachments of cabinet secretaries are exceedingly rare – the last time one happened was 1876 – and party leaders appear to be focusing instead on their slow-moving impeachment inquiry of Biden for alleged and thus far unproved corruption.Last month, a small group of Republicans joined with Democrats to halt an earlier attempt by Greene to impeach Mayorkas, who would likely be acquitted in the Democratic-controlled Senate anyway. Tom McClintock, one of the eight GOP lawmakers who opposed the attempt, said he did so because it could backfire on the party:
      If Greene is successful in redefining impeachment, then the next time Democrats have the majority, we can expect this new definition to be turned against the conservatives on the Supreme Court and any future Republican administration. And there will be nobody to stop them, because Republicans will have signed off on this new and unconstitutional abuse of power.
      One of the reasons Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election failed was because of the resistance of Mike Pence, his vice-president who recently abandoned his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. As the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports, Pence’s son played a role in convincing his father to say no to Trump:Mike Pence reportedly decided to skip the congressional certification process for Joe Biden’s 2020 election win, because to preside over it as required by the constitution would be “too hurtful” to his “friend”, Donald Trump. He was then shamed into standing up to Trump by his son, a US marine.“Dad, you took the same oath I took,” the then vice-president’s son Michael Pence said, according to ABC News, adding that it was “an oath to support and defend the constitution”.Ultimately, Pence did supervise certification, even as it was delayed by the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.Trump incited the attack by telling supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell” in his cause – the lie that Biden’s win was the result of electoral fraud.Some chanted for Pence to be hanged. Nine deaths have been linked to the riot, more than a thousand arrests made and hundreds of convictions secured.Throughout the investigation of January 6 by a House committee, Pence was praised for standing up to Trump and fulfilling his constitutional duty. He later released a memoir, So Help Me God, about his time as Trump’s No 2.But according to ABC, which on Tuesday cited sources familiar with Pence’s testimony to the special counsel Jack Smith, investigating Trump’s election subversion, Pence offered details not included in his book, including how he had to be prodded into doing his duty.Before he was House speaker, Mike Johnson was the architect of a brief signed by dozens of Republican lawmakers that supported Donald Trump’s failed attempt to convince the courts to disrupt Joe Biden’s election win. The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports that in her new book, Liz Cheney, the Wyoming congresswoman who lost her seat last year in large part due to opposing the former president, accuses Johnson of duping his allies about the effort:In a new book, the anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney accuses the US House speaker, Mike Johnson, of dishonesty over both the authorship of a supreme court brief in support of Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election and the document’s contents, saying Johnson duped his party with a “bait and switch”.“As I read the amicus brief – which was poorly written – it became clear Mike was being less than honest,” Cheney writes. “He was playing bait and switch, assuring members that the brief made no claims about specific allegations of [electoral] fraud when, in fact, it was full of such claims.”Cheney also says Johnson was neither the author of the brief nor a “constitutional law expert”, as he was “telling colleagues he was”. Pro-Trump lawyers actually wrote the document, Cheney writes.As Trump’s attempts to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden progressed towards the deadly January 6 attack on Congress, Cheney was a House Republican leader. Turning against Trump, she sat on the House January 6 committee and was ostracised by her party, losing her Wyoming seat last year. More

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      George Santos to face expulsion vote on Thursday, House speaker says

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      The Republican speaker of the US House, Mike Johnson, said the chamber would vote on whether to expel George Santos on Thursday, leaving it up to lawmakers to decide whether the New Yorker should be removed from office for embellishing his résumé and allegedly breaking federal law.“What we’ve said as the leadership team is we’re going to allow people to vote their conscience,” Johnson told reporters on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.“I think it’s the only appropriate thing we can do. We’ve not whipped the vote and we wouldn’t. I trust that people will make that decision thoughtfully and in good faith.“I personally have real reservations about doing this, I’m concerned about a precedent that may be set for that. So, everybody’s working through that and we’ll see how they vote tomorrow.”On Tuesday, Santos said he would not resign in order to avoid becoming only the sixth representative ever expelled from the House.“If I resign, I make it easy for this place,” Santos, 35, told reporters. “This place is run on hypocrisy. I’m done playing a part for the circus. If they want me to leave Congress, they’re going to have to take that tough vote.”But that tough vote was already drawing near.Earlier, two Democrats, Robert Garcia of California and Dan Goldman of New York, initiated proceedings to require an expulsion vote within two legislative days. Later, two Republicans, Anthony D’Esposito of New York and Michael Guest of Mississippi, did the same.“We want to make sure that happens this week,” Garcia said. “I think whatever it takes to get that vote this week is what we’re doing. He has no place in Congress.”The list of previous expellees includes three men who fought for the Confederacy in the civil war and two convicted of crimes. The last man forced out, James A Traficant of Ohio, a congressman with a famous “piled-high pompadour” toupée who was convicted of fraud, bribery, obstruction of justice and racketeering, was expelled in 2002.On Thursday, a two-thirds majority will be required to add Santos to the list of shame.Santos was elected last year but quickly saw his résumé torn to pieces by investigative reporting and past actions subjected to legal scrutiny. He admitted embellishing that résumé – which included bizarre claims about his academic and professional history – but denied wrongdoing. Among more picaresque episodes, he denied having been a drag performer in Brazil – a denial now undermined by reporters including the author of a new biography.Santos has pleaded not guilty to 23 federal fraud charges but has not yet stood trial. As indicated by Johnson on Wednesday, many in Congress, including senior Democrats, have cited the lack of a conviction when opposing previous attempts to expel Santos, saying to do so without the verdict of a court would set a dangerous precedent.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat in the closely divided Senate, is under indictment for alleged corruption. He denies wrongdoing.In Santos’s case, his own party generated a previous attempt to expel him. But it took a damning House ethics committee report, issued this month and detailing the use of campaign funds for expenses including Botox treatment and luxury purchases, to change the political equation.Johnson must govern with a narrow and unruly majority. A Santos exit would eat into that margin but Johnson this week attempted to persuade Santos to quit before he could be thrown out.Santos has said he will not run again but his refusal to quit prompted an unnamed Republican to tell Axios he thought Santos wanted the “notoriety” of becoming the sixth person ever forcibly expelled.If Santos is removed, his New York district, which covers parts of Long Island and Queens, will have a special election within 90 days. More

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      Rosalynn Carter memorial service: Jimmy Carter joins mourners at Atlanta church – as it happened

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      Former president Jimmy Carter was in attendance at the tribute service for his wife, Rosalynn Carter:Carter turned 99 in October, and has been in hospice in his home town of Plains, Georgia, since February.Here’s the moment he arrived at the church for the ceremony:Mourners including Joe and Jill Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Melania Trump and Georgia’s two Democratic senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock paid tribute to former first lady Rosalynn Carter at a ceremony in Atlanta. Back in Washington DC, House Democrats called up a resolution to expel fraudster George Santos from the chamber that must be voted on within two days, while the chamber’s Republican leaders are reportedly considering holding a vote on a separate resolution Thursday.Here’s what else has been happening today:
      Jimmy Carter was in attendance at the memorial service in Atlanta. The 99-year-old former president has been receiving hospice care since February.
      Amy Carter spoke about her parents’ love for each other, and read from a letter her father wrote to Rosalynn while he was serving in the navy.
      Nikki Haley received the endorsement of Koch-affiliated Super Pac Americans for Prosperity Action, in a potential boost for her quest to overtake Donald Trump in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
      Santos insists he will not resign, while the House resolution to expel him needs two-thirds majority support to pass.
      Trump and Santos aren’t so different, a biographer of the New York congressman says.
      Back in Congress, Punchbowl News reports that the House’s Republican leadership is considering taking up GOP lawmaker Michael Guest’s resolution to expel George Santos on Thursday:Passing Guest’s resolution would make the separate motion proposed by Democrat Robert Garcia moot. It remains to be seen if either proposal has the two-thirds majority support necessary to pass.Here are a few photos as the tribute to Rosalynn Carter wrapped up in Atlanta:Pallbearers have loaded Rosalynn Carter’s casket into a hearse, which is now departing the tribute ceremony.Her funeral is scheduled for tomorrow in Plains, Georgia, the Carters’s hometown. That ceremony and her burial at the family residence are restricted to family and friends, according to the Carter Center.The tribute to Rosalynn Carter is nearing its conclusion in Atlanta.The closing benediction was given by Tony Lowden, a pastor at the church the Carters attended in Plains, Georgia, who made a point to acknowledge the work of the Secret Service agents who guarded the former president and his family during his time in office, and in the decades since:
      Oftentimes, Mr. President, we don’t acknowledge those who keep us safe. Rosalynn Carter is in heaven, and she did the work of the Lord and the kingdom all around the world. And Don and all the directors for 46 years got her and her family home safe. And I say thank each and every one of you, those that are standing post and those that are listening on the radios right now. Thank you and she loves you and a nothing you can do about it.
      Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter’s grandson Jason, a former Georgia state senator, spoke about his grandmother’s work fighting Guinea worm disease, as well as advocating for better mental health care.“Her advocacy for mental health was a 50-year climb that is as remarkable as any other and has been mentioned already. But if you imagine just how far our society has come in the last five years on issues of mental health, and you think that she decided in 1970 to tackle the anxious and stigma associated with mental illness, it is remarkable how far she could see and how far she was willing to walk,” Carter said. “And that effort changed lives and it saved lives, including in my own family. She was made for these long journeys.”Jason Carter continued:
      John Lewis once said that in all of his marches, he only really learned one thing: Don’t let them turn you around. That was my grandmother to a tee. One of my last memories of her was in a hospital. We were there for my grandfather, but she had her own physical limitations that made it hard for her to walk. She had to practice. She was ready to go for one of these walks and she picked up this cane and I looked at the cane. She looked at me and she said, ‘you know it’s not a cane … it’s a trekking pole’ She said, ‘the exact same kind that those women use when they go to the South Pole.’
      I watched her walk down that hall with that trekking pole. I followed her and I just pray that we never lose sight of that path.
      Back in Georgia, Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter’s daughter Amy Carter spoke about the importance of love in their relationship:“My mom spent most of her life in love with my dad,” she said. “Their partnership and love story was a defining feature of her life. Because he is unable to speak to you today, I’m going to share some of his words about loving and missing. This is from a letter he wrote 75 years ago while he was serving in the navy”:
      My darling, every time I have ever been away from you, I had been thrilled when I returned to discover just how wonderful you are. While I’m away I tried to convince myself that you really are not could not be as sweet and beautiful as I remember. But when I see you I fall in love with you all over again. Does that seem strange to you? It doesn’t to me. Goodbye darling. Until tomorrow, Jimmy.
      Two House Democratic lawmakers have moved to force a vote within 48 hours on a resolution to expel Republican congressman and admitted fabulist George Santos from the chamber.California’s Robert Garcia introduced the resolution earlier this year, and together with New York’s Dan Goldman have called it up as a privileged resolution, meaning it must be voted on within the next two days. While it will need a two-thirds majority vote of the chamber to pass, momentum to oust Santos has increased in the past weeks following the release of an ethics committee report that found “grave and pervasive campaign finance violations and fraudulent activity” by the New York Republican.“The time has finally come to remove George Santos from Congress. If we’re going to restore faith in government, we must start with restoring integrity in the U.S. House of Representatives,” Garcia said in a statement.Added Goldman: “George Santos is an admitted liar, fraud, and cheat, and the recent Ethics Committee report confirms what we’ve long known: George Santos is wholly unfit for public office.”Former president Jimmy Carter was in attendance at the tribute service for his wife, Rosalynn Carter:Carter turned 99 in October, and has been in hospice in his home town of Plains, Georgia, since February.Here’s the moment he arrived at the church for the ceremony:Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s son, James “Chip” Carter is speaking now at his mother’s memorial service.He called Rosalynn the glue that held the family together “through the ups and downs and thicks and thins” of family life and politics.Chip Carter, 73, recalled that when he was 14 he used to get beaten up for wearing a sticker supporting Lyndon Johnson for president.But he said his mother would mend his shirt torn in the fight and replace the sticker for him, as he supported the Democratic Party cause.He also said that Rosalynn Carter “was influential in getting me into rehab for drug and alcohol addiction. She saved my life.”He called Jimmy Carter’s loss in the 1980 election to the Republican ticket of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush “devastating to us all.”Chip Carter just mentioned that his mother was “racked with dementia” prior to her death last month.The memorial service for first lady Rosalynn Carter is now under way, with the call to worship and invocation.The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chamber Chorus just gave the patient congregation a stirring rendition of America the Beautiful, as Carter’s casket entered the church.The setting is the Glenn Memorial United Methodist church on the campus of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.The sunlight is streaming through the windows and illuminating many on the left-hand side of the congregation.The front row in the church is now occupied with the leadership names of the day.Jimmy Carter, 99, has just entered, semi-recumbent on a sort of wheeled chair-bed. He is at one end of the row. Joe Biden is close by with, to the president’s right, Jill Biden, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, Michelle Obama and Melania Trump.The choir is now singing America the Beautiful, as Rosalynn Carter’s casket has been brought in and placed at the front of the church.The hearse has pulled up to the steps of the church and the military guard is marching forward to lift the coffin and take it in to the service.Rosalynn Carter’s flower-decorated coffin is now being carried. The political leaders past and present are now in the church. More details shortly.Brian Kemp, the governor of Georgia, a Republican, has just entered the church and taken a pew.Georgia’s Democratic US Senators, Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff have also entered and found a seat.We await the biggest names of the day. It’s a brilliantly sunny day with a cloudless, bright blue sky above the church on the campus of Emory University in Atlanta.Things are clearly running a little behind schedule before the start of the memorial service for Rosalynn Carter.It’s due to start at 1pm ET but there are still at least five rows at the front of the church in Atlanta empty and clearly waiting for their VIP occupants.The congregation that’s there so far was just treated to some Elgar from the orchestra and now something of a hush has descended upon the church, apart from a bit of hold music. We await the arrival of the courtege.Guests are filing in to the Glenn Memorial church in Atlanta for the tribute service to former first lady Rosalynn Carter. Her husband Jimmy Carter will attend, as will Joe and Jill Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Melania Trump and Georgia’s two Democratic senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. None of the group is scheduled to speak at the event, which will instead feature eulogies from Carter family members and people who knew the former first lady. Back in Washington DC, House Democrats are expected to propose a resolution to expel fraudster George Santos from the chamber that must be brought up for consideration within two days. We’ll be watching for signs of if the resolution has the support to pass.Here’s what else has been happening today:
      Nikki Haley received the endorsement of Koch-affiliated Super Pac Americans for Prosperity Action, in a potential boost for her quest to overtake Donald Trump in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
      Santos insists he will not resign, while the House resolution to expel him needs two-thirds majority support to pass.
      Trump and Santos aren’t so different, a biographer of the New York congressman says.
      Reporters traveling with Joe Biden say the president and first lady have arrived at Glenn Memorial church in Atlanta ahead of the tribute service for Rosalynn Carter.Traveling with them are a number of current and former elected officials, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Georgia’s two Democratic senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. Jimmy Carter is also expected to attend, though is not reported to be traveling with the president, as is former first lady Melania Trump.As guests are filing in, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra is running through some of Rosalynn Carter’s favorite songs, including compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach.In Atlanta, guests are arriving for this afternoon’s tribute service to former first lady Rosalynn Carter. Here are some photos ahead of the event, which begins at 1pm: More

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      ‘George Santos models himself pretty directly off Trump’ – biographer Mark Chiusano

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      “I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.” So says Matt Damon in the title role of The Talented Mr Ripley, the Oscar-winning film from 1999. The line would make a fitting political epitaph for George Santos, the New York Republican facing imminent expulsion from Congress after a scathing House ethics committee report cited “overwhelming evidence” of lawbreaking.Santos, 35, also faces federal charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, false statements, falsification of records, aggravated identity theft and credit card fraud, in a 23-count indictment in his home state. If convicted, he is likely to spend years in prison.“This story is a tragedy,” says Mark Chiusano, author of The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos, a book published this week. “He is someone who is clearly very ambitious and wants to live a kind of wealthy life, a life of fame and notoriety, and he is trying to attain essentially a version of the American dream, which so many people have sought over the years.“The sad thing is that he realises pretty early on that he’s not going to get there, he’s not going to be able to make a ton of money on Wall Street, he’s not going to be as famous as The Real Housewives, for example. Because of the difficulty and grittiness of the usual road to the American dream, he decides to go a different route.“He starts making everything up, rather than [be like] members of his family who just kept their heads down and worked hard and tried to build a life. He tries to take this shortcut and the shortcut eventually catches up with him and it’s a real tragedy. He has no one to blame but himself but he is in a very difficult place now.”Chiusano, 33, covered Santos at Newsday, a newspaper serving Long Island. He first spoke to Santos by phone in 2019, when he was announcing a run for Congress. When Chiusano asked where the launch would happen, he was surprised to hear Santos say right now – even though the candidate was in Florida.The author recalls: “That was the first strangeness of him and then I kept writing about other strange things he was doing. It was unclear where he lived, whether he even really lived in the district, his QAnon slogan promoting – all sorts of strange things for the next two cycles.”Like Ripley, Chiusano discovered that Santos can be charming. “One of the things that almost everyone I talked to who knew him said is he’s very charismatic and it’s true. He has a big personality. He’s a tall man. He makes friends easily. He’s a fun guy to hang out with.“I got a little bit of that sense in our phone calls but the flip side is that he can turn nasty and cutting very quickly, which he certainly did with his financial victims and to a lesser extent with me, just starting to get more critical and angry, and I’m sure there’s more of that to come once the book comes out.”Santos did not cooperate for the book.‘This hustling, grifting lifestyle’In 2020, up against an incumbent, Santos lost the election by more than 12 points. But two years later the incumbent was gone, redistricting worked in Republicans’ favour and there was local frustration over Covid and crime. Santos won New York’s third congressional district, which encompasses parts of Nassau county and Queens.His biography came under intense scrutiny – and began to fall apart. Among his most spectacular lies: his grandparents fled the Holocaust; his mother was caught up in the 9/11 attacks in New York; he was the “star” of the Baruch College volleyball team; he worked for the Wall Street firms Citigroup and Goldman Sachs; he was a producer on the failed Broadway show Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark; he “lost four employees” in the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida; the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.Furthermore, it emerged that in 2008 Santos, who has deployed an array of pseudonyms, was charged by Brazilian prosecutors for using a fake name and a stolen chequebook to buy goods including tennis shoes. Also, in 2016 he allegedly took $3,000 from an online fundraiser intended to help save the life of a dog owned by a disabled military veteran.It seems there was no “loss of innocence” or “turning point” for Santos. Raised in New York by Brazilian migrants, he was always a fabulist leaving a trail of victims.“One thing that struck me in reporting the book is how committed he was to this hustling, grifting lifestyle from a very early age,” Chiusano says.When Santos was in high school, he cheated his sister’s 16-year-old friend, who spoke little English, out of video game equipment and technology worth hundreds of dollars.“This kid saw Santos as a kind of older brother figure, a mentor looking out for him, which is a through line with Santos: he’ll befriend you and be very charming and charismatic before he turns. He did turn on this kid and the kid ended up going back to Brazil pretty empty-handed.”Not even Santos’s family was safe. Chiusano adds: “I write in the book about how he mooches off his very elderly and religiously devout grandmother, who’s living in Brazil. He gets money off her to fund his fun lifestyle in Brazil as a late adolescent teenager.“In New York he is stealing from his Aunt Elma, who again is this woman who worked very hard to build a life in New York and seems to have doted on Santos and he used that to his benefit. This commitment to doing whatever he can to make a couple of bucks is a through line in his life up to the present.”Interviewees agreed that this goes beyond everyday grifting. “A story that I heard many times was a version of: ‘Santos was talking to me and told me X and not only was it fake but he really believed it.’ The idea that he believed the lies he was telling was something that many people thought was the case.”Chiusano spent weeks in Brazil tracking down people who remember Santos as a drag queen and beauty pageant hopeful.“The Brazil piece of his story was important to the book because it shows Santos at this major moment of his development, which is that he’s in Brazil away from the New York life he knew. No one knows who he is that well so he can pretend to be this other person.“He pretends to be a very wealthy person, someone who’s on his way up in the world, using his American background to seem more impressive than he actually is. I talked to a lot of people down there who knew him and this, of course, is when he is experimenting with dressing in drag.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This has been a controversial part of Santos’s story. There’s a couple of famous pictures and videos of him dancing in drag but he claims that these pictures are all that there was. That was not what I found when I went down there and talked to people who remembered him as a drag queen.”Santos is married to a man named Matt. Yet he has endorsed Florida’s hardline “don’t say gay” bill and aligned himself with far-right Republicans who scaremonger about drag queens in schools and advocate book bans. Does he have any true political convictions or are these, too, just an act?Chiusano finds it hard to say. “He has flipped on so many things. He’s flip-flopped on abortion. He claims that he was no rightwinger and now he is very much associated with the far right of the Republican party. He’s definitely flipped and he’ll definitely say whatever he needs to satisfy an audience.“But there do seem to be some core conservative beliefs. Many members of his family are pretty conservative. They’re pretty pro-[Jair] Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who’s very conservative. I don’t think that he is secretly a super-lefty guy who is making this up. He’s conservative but he takes any opportunity that is laid in his path.”Santos belongs to what Chiusano dubs “the shamelessness caucus” in Congress, along with provocateurs such as Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. “They are there mostly to get more attention for themselves,” Chiusano says. “They don’t seem to have so much interest in governing and he has joined them, sometimes voting in concert with them, co-sponsoring bills with them. Obviously a lot of people are very angry at him in Congress and are not giving him the time of day but he does have these friends on the far right.”Long obsessed with celebrity – his old tweets betray a fascination with Miley Cyrus, Paris Hilton and The Real Housewives – Santos got rich in a political era in which fame is the ultimate currency.“Some of these more shameless members feel a sense of impunity, that it doesn’t matter what they say,” Chiusano says. “In fact, the crazier that they sound, the more social media clout they have.“This is the result of breakdown of all these American institutions including the media and the party system, which used to be gatekeepers that helped give voters a better sense of here’s who this person is, but also weeding out candidates who should not have gotten to higher office. This is a very modern thing and he is a symptom of the disease. He’s not the disease itself.”‘A scary idea’There is not much doubt about Santos’s political mentor: Donald Trump.Chiusano continues: “Santos models himself pretty directly off Trump. Trump is this almost sui generis figure who is kind of shaping the Republican party and he himself is the result of all these other political forces outside himself. But Trump is a person who was already famous and already had at least a perception of being very rich and certainly had more resources that Santos did.“You can see how someone like that was able to harness these crazy political forces and become president. What’s interesting to me is the Santos story shows that even a regular person can be lying and shameless and get to office and that is, in some senses, almost scarier than someone like Trump being able to do it. If there can be many Trumps who aren’t as rich and powerful as Trump and still lie their way to office, that’s a scary idea.”But it does not appear that Santos could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. The House ethics committee detailed extravagant – and possibly illegal – spending of campaign money, including thousands of dollars on Botox, luxury brands such as Hermès, and “smaller purchases” from OnlyFans, an online platform known for sexual content.Consequently, Santos looks set to be expelled from Congress, as even Republicans run out of patience, and has said he will not run again. He has no Trump-style option to pardon himself. But Chiusano does not believe this is the last the world will hear of George Santos.“These charges are very significant and he’s facing an uphill battle but he wouldn’t be in jail for a hundred years, like Sam Bankman-Fried seems likely to be. As far as we know now, if he’s convicted, he’ll get out as a relatively young man. I definitely see a second act for him, maybe not in elected politics but certainly in the Dancing with the Stars/rightwing podcast game. It would be back to his original love of celebrity.”
      The Fabulist is published in the US by One Signal/Atria More