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      US special counsel obtained search warrant for Trump’s Twitter account

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      The US special counsel who is investigating Donald Trump obtained a search warrant for the former president’s Twitter account, and the social media platform delayed complying, a court filing on Wednesday showed.The delay in compliance prompted a federal judge to hold Twitter in contempt and fine it $350,000, the filing showed.The filing says the team of US special counsel Jack Smith obtained a search warrant in January directing Twitter, which recently rebranded to X, to produce “data and records” related to Trump’s Twitter account as well as a non-disclosure agreement prohibiting Twitter from disclosing the search warrant.The filing says prosecutors got the search warrant after a court “found probable cause to search the Twitter account for evidence of criminal offenses”. The court found that disclosing the warrant could risk that Trump would “would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation” by giving him “an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior”, according to the filing.It’s unclear what information Smith may have sought from Trump’s Twitter account. Possibilities include data about when and where the posts were written, their engagement and the identities of other accounts that reposted Trump’s content.Twitter objected to the non-disclosure agreement, saying four days after the compliance deadline that it would not produce any of the account information, according to the ruling. The judges wrote that Twitter “did not question the validity of the search warrant” but argued that the non-disclosure agreement was a violation of the first amendment and wanted the court to assess the legality of the agreement before it handed any information over.The warrant ordered Twitter to provide the records by 27 January. A judge found Twitter to be in contempt after a court hearing on 7 February, but gave the company an opportunity to hand over the documents by 5pm that evening. Twitter, however, only turned over some records that day. It didn’t fully comply with the order until 9 February, the ruling says. The delay in compliance prompted the court to Twitter in contempt, and on Wednesday, the federal court in Washington upheld that decision.Smith has charged Trump over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in an attempt to stay in power in a criminal indictment unsealed last week.Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which include conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights.Trump says he is innocent and has portrayed the investigation as politically motivated. His legal team has indicated it will argue that Trump was relying on the advice of lawyers around him in 2020 and had the right to challenge an election he believed was rigged.Trump had been a prolific user of Twitter, both before and during his presidency. Amassing more than 88 million followers, he used the platform to attack opponents, promote racist ideology, encourage violence against journalists, and even threaten nuclear war.Trump was banned from the platform following the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the Capitol for inciting violence.Trump’s account was reinstated in November 2022, following Tesla billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform. The decision was condemned by online safety and civil rights advocates who say Trump’s online presence has created risks of real-world violence.Trump has yet to tweet after being allowed back on to Twitter, preferring his own platform, Truth Social. His campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the former president posted to Truth Social on Wednesday that the Justice Department “secretly attacked” his Twitter account, and he characterized the investigation as an attempt to “infringe” on his bid to reclaim the White House in 2024.Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      Fulton county prosecutors prepare racketeering charges in Trump inquiry

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      The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia has developed sufficient evidence to charge a sprawling racketeering indictment next month, according to two people briefed on the matter.The racketeering statute in Georgia requires prosecutors to show the existence of an “enterprise” – and a pattern of racketeering activity that is predicated on at least two “qualifying” crimes.In the Trump investigation, the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has amassed enough evidence to pursue a racketeering indictment predicated on statutes related to influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the people said.Willis had previously said she was weighing racketeering charges in her criminal investigation, but the new details about the direction and scope of the case come as prosecutors are expected to seek indictments starting in the first two weeks of August.The racketeering statute in Georgia is more expansive than its federal counterpart, notably because any attempts to solicit or coerce the qualifying crimes can be included as predicate acts of racketeering activity, even when those crimes cannot be indicted separately.The specific evidence was not clear, though the charge regarding influencing witnesses could include Trump’s conversations with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which he asked Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes, the people said – and thereby implicate Trump.For the computer trespass charge, where prosecutors would have to show that defendants used a computer or network without authority to interfere with a program or data, that would include the breach of voting machines in Coffee county, the two people said.The breach of voting machines involved a group of Trump operatives – paid by the then Trump lawyer Sidney Powell – accessing the voting machines at the county’s election office and copying sensitive voting system data.The copied data from the Dominion Voting System machines, which is used statewide in Georgia, was then uploaded to a password-protected site from where election deniers could download the materials as part of a misguided effort to prove the 2020 election had been rigged.Though Coffee county is outside the jurisdiction of the Fulton county district attorney’s office, folding a potential computer trespass charge into a wider racketeering case would allow prosecutors to also seek an indictment for what the Trump operatives did there, the people said.A spokesperson for Willis did not respond to requests for comment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe district attorney’s office has spent more than two years investigating whether Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in Georgia, while prosecutors at the federal level are scrutinizing Trump’s efforts to reverse his defeat that culminated in the January 6 Capitol attack.A special grand jury in Atlanta that heard evidence for roughly seven months recommended charges for more than a dozen people, including the former president himself, its forewoman strongly suggested in interviews, though Willis will have to seek indictments from a regular grand jury.The grand jury that could decide whether to return an indictment against Trump was seated on 11 July. The selection process was attended by Willis and two prosecutors known to be on the Trump investigation: her deputy district attorney, Will Wooten, and special prosecutor Nathan Wade.Charges stemming from the Trump investigation are expected to come between the final week of July and the first two weeks of August, the Guardian has previously reported, after Willis told her team to shift to remote work during that period because of security concerns.The district attorney originally suggested charging decisions were “imminent” in January, but the timetable has been repeatedly delayed after a number of Republicans who acted as fake electors accepted immunity deals as the investigation neared its end. More

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      Donald Trump faces midnight deadline to decide whether to face grand jury

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      Donald Trump faced a deadline of midnight on Thursday to say if he would appear before a Washington grand jury convened by the special counsel Jack Smith to consider federal charges over his election subversion and incitement of the attack on Congress on 6 January 2021.Late on Wednesday, citing two people familiar with the matter, the Guardian reported that prosecutors had assembled evidence to charge Trump with three crimes.They were: obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and an unusual statute that makes it unlawful to conspire to violate civil rights.Obstruction of an official proceeding is punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Conspiracy to defraud the United States carries a maximum five-year sentence. The civil rights charge is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.By Thursday afternoon, all indications were that Trump would not agree to testify.Indictments regarding Trump’s attempted election subversion are expected soon – not only at the federal level but also in Fulton county, Georgia, where a grand jury to consider charges was recently formed. Elsewhere, this week brought charges against 16 people in a “false electors” scheme in Michigan, another battleground state.On Thursday morning, meanwhile, Politico reported that Trump had extracted a promise from the Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, to hold votes on expunging Trump’s two impeachments.Trump was impeached first for withholding military aid in an attempt to extract political dirt from Ukraine, then for inciting the Capitol attack. In both cases, Senate Republicans ensured his acquittal at trial.Trump reportedly got the promise of an expungement vote, which Politico said McCarthy “made reflexively to save his own skin”, after the speaker provoked outrage from Trump allies by declining to endorse the former president in the Republican presidential primary for the 2024 election, citing an obligation to remain neutral.An expungement vote would be purely symbolic. It also would not be guaranteed to succeed. Republicans control the House by a very slim majority. Two sitting GOP congressmen, David Valadao of California and Dan Newhouse of Washington state, voted to impeach Trump over the Capitol riot. Republicans in swing districts, particularly in heavily Democratic north-eastern states, already face uphill fights to keep their seats.Speaking to reporters on Thursday, McCarthy denied making a promise, saying “There’s no deal” with Trump, but added: “I’ve been very clear from long before – when I voted against impeachments – that [Democrats] put them in for purely political purposes. I support expungement but there’s no deal out there.”In polling averages for the Republican primary, Trump leads by about 30 points. He has maintained that lead even while facing 34 criminal charges in New York, over hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels; 37 federal charges over his retention of classified documents; the prospect of state and federal indictments over his election subversion; a $5m fine after being held liable for sexual abuse and defamation against the writer E Jean Carroll; and ongoing investigations of his business affairs.Denying all wrongdoing, Trump has pleaded not guilty to all criminal charges.Nonetheless, polling regarding a notional general election shows him in a close race with Joe Biden. Earlier this week, Miles Taylor, who was a US homeland security official when in 2018 he wrote a famous anonymous New York Times column warning of Trump’s unfitness for office, told the Guardian Trump could yet return to the White House.“There’s been a number of polls that show the ex-president beating Joe Biden by several points,” Taylor said. “It would be hubris to say, ‘Oh, no, we would beat him again a second time.’ Actually, I don’t think that. If the election was held today, I think Donald Trump would defeat Joe Biden, and that really concerns me.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTaylor also pointed to the supine nature of the Republican party, saying McCarthy, the House speaker, “thought Trump was a buffoon and a danger and I’m sure Kevin still thinks that privately” but is unwilling, or unable, to move in any way against him.Taylor said: “Those people publicly, because they’re afraid, are still supporting the man. That collective anonymity is putting us in pretty seriously great danger.”Trump revealed on Tuesday that Smith had told him he faced potential charges. According to the New York Times, since then Trump has consulted with Washington allies including McCarthy and the New Yorker Elise Stefanik, chair of the Republican House conference and a staunch supporter who many observers think is eyeing selection as Trump’s running mate next year.Trump’s closest challenger for the Republican nomination, Ron DeSantis, this week mildly criticised Trump for his inaction on 6 January 2021, as the Capitol was attacked, but also said charges against the former president over his election subversion would not “be good for the country”.Court dates are set to clash with the Republican primary calendar. Trump faces three civil trials in New York, one to begin in October and two in January.In the criminal cases, Smith, the special counsel, has asked for trial over the classified documents charges to begin later this year. In the hush-money case, the trial is scheduled for March – in the thick of the Republican primary. Lawyers for Trump are attempting to delay both trials until after the general election next year, when Trump or another Republican president could order all cases dropped.On Thursday, Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican elections lawyer, told the Washington Post the US was “in as precarious a situation as we’ve ever been”.“I don’t know what the chances are of things really going off the rails,” Ginsberg said, “but no question that there is a toxic mix unprecedented in the American experiment.” More

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      Trump under investigation for civil rights conspiracy in January 6 inquiry

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      Federal prosecutors investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results have evidence to charge the former president with three crimes, including section 241 of the US legal code that makes it unlawful to conspire to violate civil rights, two people familiar with the matter said.The potential charges detailed in a target letter sent to Trump by prosecutors from the office of special counsel Jack Smith, who also charged Trump with retaining classified documents last month, was the clearest signal of an imminent indictment.Prosecutors appear to have evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States based on the target letter, two statutes that the House select committee examining the January 6 Capitol attack issued criminal referrals for last year.The target letter to Trump identified a previously unconsidered third charge, the sources said. That is section 241 of title 18 of the US code, which makes it unlawful to conspire to threaten or intimidate a person in the “free exercise” of any right or privilege under the “Constitution or laws of the United States”.The statute, enacted to protect the civil rights of Black voters targeted by white supremacy groups after the US civil war, is unusual because it is typically used by prosecutors in law enforcement misconduct and hate crime prosecutions, though its use has expanded in recent years.What the potential charges means for Trump is unclear.Prosecutors have been examining various instances of Trump pressuring officials like his former vice-president Mike Pence, but Trump’s efforts to obstruct the transfer of power could also be construed as conspiring to defraud voters more generally.The other two statutes, meanwhile, suggest a core part of the case against Trump is focused on the so-called fake electors scheme and the former president’s efforts to use the fake slates in a conspiracy to stop the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election win on 6 January 2021.The target letter did not cite any seditious conspiracy, incitement of insurrection or deprivation of rights under color of law – other areas for which legal experts have suggested Trump could have legal risk.A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment about the contents of the target letter, though a senior adviser to Trump did not dispute that section 241 was listed when reached late on Tuesday night.The New York Times also reported the inclusion of the statute.Trump, who is facing unprecedented legal peril as he leads the pack of candidates for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, called the target letter “HORRIFYING NEWS” in a post on his Truth Social platform, where he first disclosed the development.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLast year, the House select committee that investigated the Capitol attack concluded that Trump committed multiple crimes in an attempt to reverse his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruction of an official proceeding.The committee issued symbolic criminal referrals to the justice department, although at that point the justice department had since stepped up its criminal investigation with the addition of new prosecutors in spring 2022 before they were folded into the special counsel’s office.House investigators also concluded that there was evidence for prosecutors to charge Trump with conspiracy to defraud and obstruction of an official proceeding. They also issued referrals for incitement of insurrection, which was not listed in the target letter.Should prosecutors charge Trump in the federal January 6 investigation, the case could go to trial much more quickly than the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case – before the 2024 election – because pre-trial proceedings would not be delayed by rules governing national security materials.Trump was charged last month for retaining national security materials and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them. Trump and his co-defendant, his valet Walt Nauta, who was charged with conspiring to obstruct and making false statements to the FBI, have both pleaded not guilty.The target letter to Trump comes weeks before the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, is expected to charge Trump and his allies for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia, the Guardian has previously reported. More

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      Sixteen people charged in Michigan 2020 false elector scheme

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      Sixteen people who signed paperwork falsely claiming Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election in Michigan have been criminally charged, Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat, announced on Tuesday.Michigan was one of several swing states that Trump lost in 2020 in which he and his legal team convened alternate slates of electors as part of an effort to overturn the election. The Tuesday charges mark the first time any of the electors have been charged.Each of the fake electors was charged with eight felony counts, including multiple counts of forgery, a felony punishable by 14 years in prison in Michigan. The other charges include conspiracy to commit forgery, conspiracy to commit uttering and publishing, conspiracy to commit election law forgery, and election law forgery. The charges were filed in state court in Lansing, the Michigan capital.The 16 people charged include Meshawn Maddock, a former co-chair of the Michigan Republican party, and Kathy Berden, a national commiteewoman for the Republican National Committee. The other 14 fake electors held various connections to the state and local party.Knowing that Trump lost the election, the 16 electors met in the basement of the Michigan Republican party headquarters on 14 December 2020 – the same day the legitimate electors convened, and three weeks before Congress would meet to certify the election results on 6 January – and knowingly signed “multiple certificates” falsely proclaiming Trump the winner in their state, Nessel said in a statement. Those certificates were transmitted to the National Archives in Washington.“This plan – to reject the will of the voters and undermine democracy – was fraudulent and legally baseless,” Nessel said in recorded remarks. “The False Electors’ actions undermined the public’s faith in the integrity of our elections, and not only violated the spirit of the laws enshrining and defending our democracy but, we believe, also plainly violated the laws by which we administer our elections in Michigan and peaceably transfer power in America.“Undoubtedly, there will be those who will claim these charges are political in nature. But where there is overwhelming evidence of guilt in respect to multiple crimes, the most political act I could engage in as a prosecutor would be to take no action at all,” Nessel added.The Michigan charges come as both the justice department and the district attorney in Fulton county, Georgia, are examining fake electors as part of a broader inquiry into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump announced on Tuesday he had received a letter from the justice department saying he was a target of an investigation. Charges in Fulton county are expected sometime before the end of August.Nessel referred the fake electors to the justice department in January 2022, but reopened the case earlier this year when federal prosecutors had not brought charges, according to a person familiar with the matter.Slates of false electors were convened in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In addition to the criminal investigations into the broader scheme, there is also a civil lawsuit in Wisconsin seeking $2.4m from those who signed their names and to block them from serving as electors again.Hugo Lowell contributed reporting More

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      in US Politics

      Georgia grand jury selected in Trump case over attempt to overturn 2020 defeat

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      A grand jury selected in Georgia on Tuesday is expected to say whether Donald Trump and associates should face criminal charges over their attempt to overturn the former president’s defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election.The district attorney of Fulton county, Fani Willis, has indicated she expects to obtain indictments between the end of July and the middle of August. Trump also faces possible federal charges over his election subversion, culminating in his incitement of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.Trump already faces trials on 71 criminal charges: 34 in New York over hush money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels and 37 in Florida, from federal prosecutors and regarding his retention of classified documents after leaving office.His legal jeopardy does not stop there. In a civil case in New York, Trump was fined about $5m after being found liable for sexual abuse and defamation against the writer E Jean Carroll. Another civil case, concerning Trump’s business practices, continues in the same state.Grand jury selection for the Georgia case comes at a febrile moment in US society. Denying all wrongdoing and claiming political persecution, Trump remains the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination to face Biden again at the polls next year.Trump has repeatedly claimed Willis, who is African American, is motivated by racism as well as political animus. Willis has indicated possible charges under an anti-racketeering law also used to target members of gangs.Before 2020, no Democratic candidate for president had won Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992. But Biden beat Trump by 0.2% of the vote, or a little under 12,000 ballots.As he explored ways to stay in office, Trump was recorded telling the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s win. The Fulton county investigation of such attempted election subversion has produced dramatic headlines, stoking anger on both sides of a deepening political divide.In February, the foreperson of the grand jury that investigated the case told CNN it would be a “good assumption” that a subsequent panel would recommend indictments – to be decided on by Willis – for more than a dozen people.The foreperson also told the New York Times it was “not rocket science” to work out if Trump would be one of those people. The former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is among Trump aides and associates also believed at risk of indictment.In March, the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, was reported to have told grand jurors: “If somebody had told Trump that aliens came down and stole Trump ballots … Trump would’ve believed it.”Last month, eight of 16 “fake electors” who sought to falsely declare Trump the winner in Georgia were revealed to have reached immunity deals.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTwo grand juries were impaneled on Tuesday, each with 23 members and three alternates.Elie Honig, a former state and federal prosecutor now senior legal analyst for CNN, said: “This is now a ‘regular’ grand jury. At the end of it, if Fani Willis asks for an indictment, they will vote on it. The vast majority of times, that does result in an indictment.”Ed Garland, a local attorney, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution the jurors would face an “awesome responsibility” that “no other group of Georgia citizens has ever dealt with – the potential indictment of a former president”.Garland added: “This is a case that has been saturated in the media with political overtones, so it is imperative for them to be fair and impartial and for our judicial system to live up to its ideals.”At the courthouse, the judge presiding over grand jury selection, Robert McBurney, reminded reporters of the sensitivity of proceedings. “It would not go well if any of [the jurors’] pictures appear in any of your outlets,” he said. “If you need extra photos, get Fani Willis.”Filmed arriving at the courthouse, Willis did not speak to reporters. More

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      Man accused of attacking Capitol officer as January 6 arrests pile up

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      Americans continue to be arrested on suspicion of taking part in the Capitol attack, two and half years after the January 6 insurrection by supporters of Donald Trump.Court documents on Monday showed that a Michigan man accused of attacking a police officer with a flagpole during the insurrection was arrested in Florida last Friday, a day after an armed man also wanted for the rioting was arrested near Barack Obama’s Washington home. Another man suspected of violence at the Capitol was arrested in Maryland last month.Latest filings show that Jeremy Rodgers, 28, was arrested last Friday in Orlando and faces felony and misdemeanor charges, including assaulting a federal officer with a weapon.Prosecutors say surveillance video shows Rodgers carrying a blue flag on his way to the Capitol and using it to strike a Capitol police officer on the helmet and then swinging the flagpole in the direction of officers, during the swarming of the seat of the US Congress.He is accused of joining with thousands of other Trump supporters who invaded the Capitol in a deadly insurrection that sought, ultimately unsuccessfully, to halt the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 election, at the urging of the defeated president.Rodgers was among a crowd pushing through police lines outside the entrance to the chamber of the House of Representatives, investigators said. After another scuffle with police, Rodgers paraded through the Capitol rotunda waving his flag before leaving, officials said.Last Thursday, a man armed with explosive materials and weapons, and also wanted for crimes related to the Capitol attack insurrection was arrested in the Washington neighborhood where Obama lives, law enforcement officials said.Taylor Taranto, 37, was chased by Secret Service agents before being apprehended, and had an open warrant on charges related to the 2021 insurrection, two law enforcement officials said, and also had made social media threats against a public figure.Meanwhile, on 13 June, Adam Obest, 42, of Thurmont, Maryland, was arrested and charged with crimes including assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon on January 6, 2021, after reviews of police body camera footage, federal prosecutors announced. He and his wife had attended Trump’s rally shortly beforehand.More than 1,000 people in total have been arrested, across almost all states, for January 6-related crimes. More

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      Republicans claim Democrats can’t keep us safe – crime data disagrees

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      Be it congressional campaigns or defending Donald Trump from his many legal entanglements, Republicans have kept up a consistent message to the US: Democrats can’t be trusted to keep you safe.“Alvin Bragg … is going after President Trump when you have all kinds of things happening in his town that are harmful to families who live there,” Ohio congressman Jim Jordan, one of Trump’s top allies in Congress, said on Fox News after the Democratic Manhattan prosecutor in March indicted Trump for allegedly falsifying business records. Jordan, who chairs the House judiciary committee, appeared to be ignoring data that shows New York is one of the safest cities in the country.As the Covid-19 pandemic upended the American economy and day-to-day life in 2020, homicides shot up by 30%, the largest one-year jump on record. Republicans used that spike, along with broader crime concerns, as a cudgel against Democrats to successfully regain control of the House of Representatives two years later.But Third Way, a center-left thinktank, has found that states which voted for Trump in the 2020 election had overall higher murder rates than those which supported Joe Biden. This trend, called the “red state murder gap”, has been consistent for 20 years. The pattern remains the same even if the most populous county in each red state is excluded – undercutting an argument common on the right that large cities, which tend to be led by Democrats, are to blame for homicides.“There’s a narrative out there that the crime problem is a blue states, blue city crime problem,” said Jim Kessler, Third Way’s executive vice-president for policy and an author of the study. “We thought, ‘OK, let’s challenge that, let’s see if it’s true.’ And it’s not.”What’s harder to tease out is why this split exists, and even the degree to which political factors are to blame for it. Many of the worst-affected states are in the south, a region that has had historically higher murder rates. And though crime may be a national political issue, in reality, local authorities such as mayors and police officials often have the most powerful roles in ensuring public safety.“I think it’s very difficult to put a partisan spin on this,” said Jeff Asher, a co-founder of AH Datalytics, which tracks criminal justice data. “I think that you can maybe say that places with state legislatures that are not focused on finding effective solutions to gun violence, you could place that blame on them. But generally … gun violence is local, and it’s usually local causes rather than statewide or federal causes.”Before Mississippi overtook it in 2019 and 2020, Louisiana led the nation in homicides per capita from 2000 to 2018, with its most populous city, New Orleans, ranking among the most murder-plagued in the nation. Asher, who lives in the city, blamed that on a range of factors, from the police department’s failure to solve many homicides to a lack of employment and educational opportunities there.And while Louisiana’s electoral votes have gone to Republicans in every election since 2000, it currently has a Democratic governor and was viewed as a blue state in the 1990s, as were many other southern states that are now considered Republican strongholds.“These issues were here in the 90s, when Louisiana was voting twice for Bill Clinton. These issues have not suddenly become issues,” Asher said.When Nick Suplina, the senior vice-president for law and policy at the gun violence prevention organization Everytown for Gun Safety, looks at the states leading the country’s homicide rate, he sees a map reflecting loose gun laws. Firearms were used in almost 80% of homicides in 2020, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, but in much of the south, state legislatures are controlled by Republicans who have in recent years made it easier to buy a gun, and carry it where one pleases.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“When you’re seeing homicides rates going up, in 2020, for instance, that’s driven by gun homicides, that’s driven by easy access to firearms, predominantly by people who shouldn’t have access to firearms,” Suplina said. “And so, really, what you’re seeing in this study isn’t so much about politics or voting proclivities, but, rather, what states have strong gun laws and what states have weak ones.”Third Way’s study covers the 2000-2020 time period, during which the National Rifle Association pushed state lawmakers to remove or oppose regulations over firearm background checks, permitting and safe storage. Many states also have preemption laws on the books that prevent mayors from enacting tighter gun legislation within their city limits.And even when states pass stricter gun laws, they are easily skirted. “Our gun laws are only as strong as the weakest gun laws of a neighboring state,” Suplina said. “We have porous state borders in this country. And so in states like Illinois, and specifically with respect to Chicago, most of their crime guns are starting in Indiana and quickly making their way across the border.”There are signs that the pandemic-era wave of murders has crested. Statistics from AH Datalytics indicate murder rates in 90 US cities until the end of May have fallen by about 12% year on year, including in New York City, where Jordan convened a hearing of the judiciary committee into the city’s purported crime problem shortly after Bragg brought his charges against Trump.“If chairman Jordan truly cared about public safety, he could take a short drive to Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Akron or Toledo in his home state, instead of using taxpayer dollars to travel hundreds of miles out of his way,” Bragg’s office said in a statement before the hearing convened, referring to cities in Jordan’s home state that all have higher murder rates than New York. More