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      Trump said Pence was ‘too honest’ over January 6 plot, says ex-vice-president in book

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      Trump said Pence was ‘too honest’ over January 6 plot, says ex-vice-president in bookPence also seems to blame anti-Trump Lincoln Project for angering former president with political ad, fueling Capitol attack Shortly before the January 6 insurrection, Donald Trump warned Mike Pence he was “too honest” when he hesitated to pursue legalistic attempts to stop certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory and would make Trump’s supporters “hate his guts”, the former vice-president writes in his memoir.The winner of the midterms is not yet clear – but the loser is Donald TrumpRead morePence also seems, bizarrely, to blame the anti-Trump Lincoln Project for enraging Trump with a political ad, thereby fueling the anger that incited the Capitol attack.Pence’s book, So Help Me God, will be published in the US on Tuesday. An extract was published by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.Describing a conversation on New Year’s Day 2021, five days before supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” stormed the US Capitol, Pence writes that he and Trump discussed a lawsuit filed by Republicans, asking a judge to declare the vice-president had “‘exclusive authority and sole discretion to decide which electoral votes should count”.Pence says Trump told him that if the suit “gives you the power, why would you oppose it?”Pence says he “told him, as I had many times, that I didn’t believe I possessed that power under the constitution”.“You’re too honest,” Trump chided. “Hundreds of thousands are gonna hate your guts … People are gonna think you’re stupid.”In the end, hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, some chanting that Pence should be hanged. Nine deaths, including law enforcement suicides, have been linked to the riot.Pence’s book emerges as he seeks to establish himself as an alternative to Trump in the Republican presidential primary for 2024.Trump has indicated he will announce his third consecutive run soon, a plan possibly delayed by midterm elections on Tuesday in which the GOP did not succeed as expected and high-profile Trump-backed candidates failed to win their races.Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor and a much stronger rival to Trump in polling than Pence, provided a bright spot for Republicans with a landslide win that thrust his name back into the spotlight.In hearings held by the House January 6 committee, Pence has been painted as a hero for refusing to attempt to block Biden’s win, even after his life was placed in danger.In the extract published on Thursday, Pence said the Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump conservative operatives, angered Trump with an ad which said Pence would “put the final nail in the coffin” of his re-election campaign by certifying Biden’s win.Rick Wilson, a Lincoln Project co-founder, told the Guardian: “It’s no secret that the Lincoln Project has lived rent-free in Donald Trump’s head since 2019. Mike Pence telling this story is one more powerful testimony to just how our ‘audience of one’ strategy unfailingly disrupts Trump world.”On Twitter, Wilson linked to the ad.On the page, Pence describes events inside the Capitol as Trump’s supporters attacked. His account parallels reporting by news outlets and testimony presented by the House committee, to which Pence has not yet testified.The devoutly Christian Pence gives his version of a call with Trump on the morning of 6 January in which Trump has widely been described as calling his vice-president a “pussy”.Pence writes: “The president laid into me. ‘You’ll go down as a wimp,’ he said. ‘If you [don’t block certification], I made a big mistake five years ago!’”Pence describes his refusal, also widely reported, to get in a Secret Service vehicle, lest his protectors drive him away while the attack was in motion.He describes meetings with Trump after the riot, when Trump’s second impeachment was in train. On 11 January, Pence writes, Trump “looked tired, and his voice seemed fainter than usual”. He says Trump “responded with a hint of regret” when he was told Pence’s wife and daughter were also at the Capitol during the deadly attack.“He then asked, ‘Were you scared?’“‘No,’ I replied, ‘I was angry. You and I had our differences that day, Mr President, and seeing those people tearing up the Capitol infuriated me.’ He started to bring up the election, saying that people were angry, but his voice trailed off. I told him he had to set that aside, and he responded quietly, ‘Yeah.’”Pence claims the Capitol rioters, more than 900 of whom have now been charged, some with seditious conspiracy, were “not our movement”. He says Trump spoke with “genuine sadness in his voice” as he “mused: ‘What if we hadn’t had the rally? What if they hadn’t gone to the Capitol? … It’s too terrible to end like this.’”Pence may risk angering Trump by presenting something approaching presidential contrition. Trump claims to regret nothing about his actions on 6 January, denying wrongdoing in the face of multiple investigations, pursuing the lie that his defeat was the result of electoral fraud and presenting rioters as political prisoners.Pence also describes a meeting on 14 January, “the day after President Trump was impeached for the second time”.“I reminded him that I was praying for him,” Pence writes. Trump, he says, answered “Don’t bother” but added: “It’s been fun.”Pence said he told Trump they would “just have to disagree on two things” – January 6 and the fact Pence would “never stop praying” for Trump.Pence says Trump smiled and said: “That’s right – don’t ever change.”TopicsBooksMike PenceDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS Capitol attackUS elections 2020US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Michigan’s top election official: ‘Every tactic tried in 2020 will be tried again’

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      InterviewMichigan’s top election official: ‘Every tactic tried in 2020 will be tried again’Sam Levine in New YorkUp for re-election as secretary of state herself, Jocelyn Benson expects more electoral interference in the looming midterms Jocelyn Benson can still rattle off all the important dates.There was 17 November 2020, when two canvassers in Michigan’s Wayne county nearly refused to certify the election results. There was 23 November, when the state board almost did the same thing. There was 5 December, when dozens of armed protesters gathered outside her home as she put up Christmas decorations with her family. And there was 6 January, when an armed mob laid siege to the US Capitol.The US is on a knife-edge. The enemy for Trump’s Republicans is democracy itself | Jonathan FreedlandRead moreTwo years later, Benson, a Democrat, is overseeing another high-stakes election in her state, a key battleground in the US. She’s also running for a second term as Michigan’s top election official – secretary of state – facing off against Kristina Karamo, a Republican who gained national attention for seeding doubt about the results of the 2020 race. There’s little doubt in Benson’s mind that there will be another attempt to overturn the will of the voters in her state.“We expect that every lever that was pulled, and every tactic that was tried in 2020, will be tried again in ’22, and will be tried again in ’24,” she said in an interview with the Guardian. “And so we go into this election cycle not only with the knowledge of those tactics, but with the expectation in fact that there will be more people in positions of authority or willing to endorse those tactics than there were in 2020.”Looking back at the 2020 election, Benson now sees two things she wishes she had done differently. First, the pandemic restricted the amount of in-person interaction Benson could have with voters, limiting her ability to answer questions. Second, she said, her office didn’t plan enough for the possibility of attempts to interfere in the vote-counting process.“We thought at that point that the 2020 election, and our work in it, would be done. Because our work was to make sure that the process went well and everything else would play out the way it always has,” she said. “We drastically underestimated the post-election challenges that we endured for the months following November 2020. And we won’t make that mistake again.”Michigan was at the forefront of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Human error in a rural county helped feed conspiracy theories of a stolen vote. A chaotic scene at a central ballot-counting station in Detroit led to baseless allegations of malfeasance. All of that culminated in an enormous pressure campaign from Trump and his allies for local bipartisan boards of canvassers not to certify the election. Several reviews have affirmed Joe Biden’s victory in the state and there is no evidence of fraud.Republicans have spent the last two years focused on the state’s election infrastructure. Some officials on local canvassing boards who voted to certify the results of the 2020 election have been quietly replaced by Republicans. There has been a well-organized effort to recruit and train people who doubt the 2020 election results to work the polls, leading to increased concern about intimidation.That potential for violence on election day is one of the things that Benson is worried about as the midterms approach.“What January 6 taught us is that there is no bottom to how far someone will go, especially armed with misinformation to interfere with the fair and free elections of our country and of our state,” she said. “Because of that variable, because of that unknown and because of that potential, I am every day hopeful but concerned that people will show up to vote on election day and instead of finding a serene and even joyful experience, it will be a stressful one at best. Or that violence will erupt either during or after the election.”She’s also worried that some people, after a barrage of misinformation about election lies, may simply decide not to vote at all. “That breaks my heart,” she said. “I worry that the attacks that democracy has endured over these years, and the misinformation that has only escalated in toxicity, will ultimately lead many people to give up on politics altogether.”Even before she was a secretary of state, Benson recognized the enormous overlooked power these state officials have. She literally wrote a book on the topic: in 2010, long before secretaries of state were household names, she authored State Secretaries of State: Guardians of the Democratic Process. More than a decade later, there’s more attention on secretaries of state than ever after an election in which their power over election rules came into clear focus.“I’ve been really gratified that there is increased attention on these positions. And then also similarly really dismayed to see people seeking to fill these roles who have no interest in protecting or serving or expanding democracy,” she said. “I’m deeply concerned about the actual harm that election deniers can do through these offices. And I’m just as concerned about the misinformation that they may validate and spread about their colleagues, about their systems, through these positions. And how that cumulatively will dismantle potentially from within.“And then all of that is just metastasized when you have someone like that in a battleground state. Like in Michigan. Or in Georgia. Where they’re going to get extra pressure, as Brad Raffensperger did in Georgia. And you know, what if they say, ‘yes, I will find those 11,000 votes’ next time?” she added, alluding to an infamous Trump call during the 2020 election.When Benson meets people on the campaign trail who still doubt the results of the last presidential election, she listens and tries to narrow down what the specific questions they have are. “I want every voter to have rightly placed faith in the system. Because they should,” she said. “I welcome the questions. I welcome the scrutiny. Because I have so much faith in the security of the elections.”But Benson also recognizes that there are some instances when, despite her position, she might not be able to get through to someone. “There are some cases in which someone else answering them, like a Republican state senator, Ed McBroom, may be more effective. They may be more likely to hear the answer from someone else. So if that happens, then you adjust accordingly,” she said.“I think ultimately if people are willing to listen to each other, and if people are willing to listen to the facts, we can get to a place, even not all the time, but sometimes, where folks understand or are willing to entertain the possibility that they have been misled,” she said.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022MichiganUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsUS elections 2020interviewsReuse this content More

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      From George Floyd to Hunter Biden: Lachlan Murdoch, Fox News and the year that tested America

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      From George Floyd to Hunter Biden: Lachlan Murdoch, Fox News and the year that tested America In an extract from his biography The Successor, Paddy Manning considers how Rupert Murdoch’s favored son dealt with the challenges of 2020, and what might come nextThe murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on 25 May 2020, captured on video, turned Black Lives Matter into the biggest protest movement in the history of the United States, with more than 15 million people turning out to demonstrations, some of them violent, in 550 towns and cities across the country.Murdoch’s succession: who wins from move to reunite Fox and News Corp?Read moreFox News had a history of antipathetic coverage of BLM, which took off after the police killing of an 18-year-old Black man, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Former primetime host Megyn Kelly subverted the narrative, asserting that Brown’s reported last words, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” were a lie, and that Brown was the aggressor. Twenty-six-year-old Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren described Black Lives Matter as “the new KKK”. Fox commentators had also defended police and rejected claims of systemic racial injustice in America. Nevertheless, the public reaction to Floyd’s murder was on a completely different scale to earlier protests, and it took place amid swirling speculation that Donald Trump would declare martial law.On the Monday morning, Lachlan Murdoch tried to set a conciliatory tone in an internal statement, urging Fox employees to “come together in their grief, work to heal, and coalesce to address injustice and inequity in our country”. After the tragic death of George Floyd, Murdoch continued:.css-lf9l6c{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#866D50;}It is essential that we grieve with the Floyd family, closely listen to the voices of peaceful protest and fundamentally understand that Black Lives matter. The FOX culture embraces and fosters diversity and inclusion. Often we speak of the ‘FOX Family,’ and never has the need to depend on and care for that family been more important. We support our Black colleagues and the Black community, as we all unite to seek equality and understanding … This is an ongoing conversation, and no one has all the answers in this moment.Some of Fox’s highest-profile commentators seemed to miss Lachlan’s memo. That same night, Tucker Carlson bemoaned the protests. “The nation went up in flames this weekend,” he opined. “No one in charge stood up to save America. Our leaders dithered and they cowered, and they openly sided with the destroyers, and in many cases, they egged them on … The worst people in our society have taken control.” Laura Ingraham blamed Antifa and “other radical elements” and said the death of Floyd had nothing to do with the violence, which was “part of a coordinated effort to eventually overthrow the United States government”. Days later, Fox News had to apologize after an episode of Special Report with Bret Baier aired a chart showing how the stock market had rallied in the days immediately after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968, the bashing of Rodney King in 1991, and the more recent killings of Michael Brown and George Floyd. Fox acknowledged the chart was insensitive and Baier apologized for a “major screw-up”. There followed an internal phone hook-up with many of its Black staffers, led by Scott, to discuss the network’s racist and hostile rhetoric towards the BLM protests. The open forum was unprecedented, but Lachlan wasn’t there and it resolved little.As the protests dragged on, Carlson only grew more strident, attacking the president for failing to re-establish law and order, calling BLM a “terror organization” and Minneapolis “our Wuhan”. In early July, CNN discovered that Carlson’s chief writer, Blake Neff, had for years been using a pseudonym to post a stream of bigoted remarks denigrating African Americans, Asian Americans, and women on an online forum, AutoAdmit, that was a hotbed for racist, sexist and other offensive content. Fox accepted Neff’s resignation within hours of CNN’s inquiry and Suzanne Scott and Jay Wallace condemned his “horrific racist, misogynistic and homophobic behavior”, saying neither the show nor the network had known of the forum and there was zero tolerance for such behavior “at any time in any part of our workforce”.More mainstream advertisers abandoned Carlson and Lachlan personally approved the comments Tucker made about Neff’s resignation in his next show. Carlson refused management requests to pre-tape the comments and struck a defiant tone, suggesting he knew he had Lachlan’s full backing. Dissociating himself from Neff’s posts, Tucker added, “we should also point out to the ghouls beating their chests in triumph of the destruction of a young man that self-righteousness also has its cost … when we pose as blameless in order to hurt other people, we are committing the gravest sin of all, and we will be punished for it, there’s no question.” Tucker announced he was going on a week’s vacation, effective immediately, which he insisted was “long planned”. One staffer told the Daily Beast off the record that Fox News had “created a white supremacist cell inside the top cable network in America, the one that directly influences the president … this is rank racism excused by Murdoch.”It was all too much for James Murdoch, who had been negotiating an exit for some months, hoping to sever his connection to the family business. At the end of July, James sent a two-line letter of resignation to the board of News Corp, effective that day, with only the briefest explanation: “My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.” In a bland joint statement, Rupert and Lachlan thanked James for his service and wished him well.James continued, of course, as beneficiary of a one-sixth share of the Murdoch Family Trust, which ultimately controlled both Fox and News Corp. In a sit-down interview with the New York Times a few months later, James told Maureen Dowd that he felt he could have little influence as a non-executive director, wanted a cleaner slate and “pulled the ripcord” because:.css-lf9l6c{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#866D50;}I reached the conclusion that you can venerate a contest of ideas, if you will, and we all do and that’s important. But it shouldn’t be in a way that hides agendas. A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimize disinformation. And I think it’s often taken advantage of. And I think at great news organizations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt – not to sow doubt, to obscure fact, if you will.It was a direct shot at Lachlan, whose mantra was to defend free speech, even that of commentators he did not agree with from time to time, and apparently regardless of whether the speaker was spreading disinformation.Dowd canvassed a scenario which was doubtless briefed by James and which could give Lachlan nightmares. Despite appearances, she wrote, the succession game may not truly be over: “Murdoch watchers across media say James is aligned with his sister Elisabeth and his half-sister, Prudence, even as he is estranged from his father and brother.”Alan Rusbridger: who broke the news?Read moreIt was true that there had been a thawing of the relationship between James and Elisabeth, which had come apart during the phone hacking crisis of 2011, when Murdoch titles were pitched into controversy in the UK. When James bought Tribeca Enterprises, which ran the famous New York Film Festival, Liz soon joined the board. The implied threat from the Dowd piece was clear: once their father was gone, when control of the empire passed to the four elder siblings, each with an equal vote on the Murdoch Family Trust, Lachlan could find himself getting rolled by James, Liz, and Prue, who were generally more liberal than Rupert.In a plausible scenario, after Rupert has died and his shares are dispersed among the four adult children, the three on the other side of Lachlan could choose to manifest control over all of the Murdoch businesses, and to do it in a way that enhances democracies around the world rather than undermines them. In this scenario, the role of Fox News has become so controversial inside the family that control of the trust is no longer just about profit and loss at the Murdoch properties. In one view that has currency among at least some of the Murdoch children, it is in the long-term interests for democracies around the world for there to be four shareholders in the family trust who are active owners in the business. Just such a scenario is freely canvassed by investors: a Wall Street analyst who has covered the Murdoch business for decades and is completely au fait with the breakdown in the relationship between the brothers, volunteers off the record that it would be “fair to assume Lachlan gets fired the day Rupert dies”.It is a formula for instability and intra-family feuds that must weigh on the minds of directors of both Fox and News Corporation as they contemplate the mortality of the 91-year-old founder, although they deny it. A source close to members of the Murdoch family questions the extent of succession planning by the boards of Fox or News Corporation and whether discussions among the directors can be genuinely independent, as corporate governance experts would like.“Rupert has total control over all the companies as long as he is alive,” the source says. “It’s an unrealistic expectation that the boards of those companies are going to use their voices to manifest independence. What is their succession plan? What if something happens to Lachlan? Do they put Viet in charge?”At the same time James announced his resignation from the News Corp board, he and Kathryn were ploughing millions into climate activism, the defeat of Trump, and other political causes. The couple had invested $100m worth of Disney shares into their foundation, Quadrivium, and through 2020 were heavy backers of mostly Democratic-leaning outfits, including $1.2m to the Biden Victory Fund and a handful of anti-Trump Republican organizations such as Defending Democracy Together, led by Bill Kristol. That was only some of the couple’s total political funding. A year later, CNBC obtained a Quadrivium tax return showing donations of $38m toward election organizations, including those dedicated to protecting voting rights.Lachlan’s personal political donations through the 2020 cycle were much smaller and were overwhelmingly directed towards the GOP, according to Federal Election Commission records. The politician he favored most was Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, an establishment Republican who made a calculated decision to become Trump’s “enabler-in-chief ” and was married to Trump’s transportation secretary, Taiwanese-born Elaine Chao, a former director of News Corp. Lachlan contributed $31,000 in four donations in March, including to the Bluegrass Committee for Kentucky Republicans. Ten days after the November election, Lachlan made a much bigger personal donation, of $1m, to the Senate Leadership Fund, which had one goal: protecting the Republican Senate majority. Lachlan did make one small donation on the Democrats’ side in the 2020 cycle, after he attended a fundraiser for Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg, the gay ex-mayor of South Bend, Indiana, pledging $1,500 to his campaign. Realizing the potential for embarrassment, he asked for it back and was duly refunded.Fox’s profitability fell by more than two-thirds in the June quarter, which would later prove to be the low point of the pandemic, as sports leagues went dark and general ad revenue collapsed. Fox News was the only bright spot, accounting for 90% of operating profit, despite advertiser boycotts of Tucker Carlson Tonight, as the 2020 presidential election campaign intensified.Three weeks out from polling day, on 14 October, the New York Post broke a story that might have influenced the outcome of the 2020 election. It had obtained a trove of messages, documents, photos and videos “purportedly” recovered from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, son of the Democratic presidential candidate, which had been taken to a Delaware computer shop for repair in 2019 and never picked up. The computer shop owner was a Trump supporter and handed the water-damaged laptop to the FBI, but also sent a copy of the hard drive to Rudy Giuliani, who had long sought to tarnish Joe Biden with conflict-of-interest allegations concerning his son’s involvement with the Ukrainian oil and gas company Burisma. The Post story zeroed in on a “smoking gun” email sent to Hunter in 2015 by Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to Burisma. The email read: “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.”According to the Post, the email gave the lie to Joe Biden’s claim that he had “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” However, it was not clear whether Pozharskyi had in fact ever met with Biden, who as vice-president had handled the Ukraine portfolio for President Obama, and the Biden campaign explicitly denied it, after going back over his official schedule.However irresistible the story was to the Post and its warhorse editor Col Allan, the rest of the mainstream media was exceedingly wary. The Post would not provide a copy of the laptop or hard drive to allow other media to verify the contents. The timing was transparently intended to damage the Biden campaign and memories remained fresh of the FBI’s momentous decision to investigate Hillary Clinton in the final days of the 2016 election campaign, after emails stolen by Russian operatives were dumped online by WikiLeaks. Twitter and Facebook intervened dramatically to stop circulation of the Post story. Twitter even temporarily locked White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s account, as well as that of the Post itself. More than 50 intelligence experts signed an open letter stating that the story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”. The Times reported that at least two Post journalists had refused to put their byline on the laptop story, while the lead reporter, Emma-Jo Morris, had not had a previous byline with the paper. Furthermore, News Corp stablemate the Wall Street Journal had been offered much the same story before the Post but concluded the central claims could not be proved. The whole story failed to gain much traction beyond the Post, Fox News, and avowedly rightwing media like Breitbart.Trump seized classified documents – but for Republicans the story is Hunter Biden’s laptop | Lawrence DouglasRead morePost-election, Hunter Biden would reveal that he was under federal investigation for tax offenses and over the following year and a half, the industrial scale of his influence-peddling became clearer, including possible breaches of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the same legislation that Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had pled guilty to violating. In mid-2021, the Post revealed that Joe Biden had indeed met Pozharskyi in 2015, and in early 2022, both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that independent experts had examined the files which purported to be from Hunter Biden’s laptop and they appeared genuine. That did not prove Hunter Biden was guilty of anything, of course, only that the laptop was his. But for his part, Lachlan believed that an important news story about the Bidens had been deliberately suppressed by the tech companies and a liberal-leaning media, saying much later:.css-lf9l6c{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#866D50;}… had the laptop belonged to another candidate’s son, it would certainly have been the only story you would have heard in the final weeks of the election. But lies were concocted: ‘the laptop was hacked, or stolen;’ it was not. Or ‘it was Russian disinformation;’ it was not, and the story was completely suppressed. It was censored by EVERYONE.The scene was set for one of the most contentious presidential elections in American history.
      The Successor: The High-Stakes Life of Lachlan Murdoch will be published in the US by Sutherland House on 15 November
      TopicsBooksFox NewsLachlan MurdochRupert MurdochJames MurdochFoxNews CorporationfeaturesReuse this content More

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      FBI arrests two alleged far-right Boogaloo Boys group members

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      FBI arrests two alleged far-right Boogaloo Boys group members The arrests come amid concerns about the potential for violence around next week’s US midterm elections The FBI has arrested two alleged members of the far-right anti-government group the Boogaloo Boys, as authorities express increasing concern about the potential for violence around next week’s US midterm elections.Timothy Teagan was expected to appear on Wednesday in federal court in Detroit, where charges against him would be unsealed, an FBI spokesperson said.In a criminal complaint filed on Monday, the FBI said there was enough evidence to charge Aron McKillips, of Sandusky, Ohio, with illegal possession of a machine gun and the interstate communication of threats. The complaint said McKillips was a member of the Boogaloo Boys and was believed to be in a militia group called the Sons of Liberty.Penn State students outraged over invitation to far-right Proud Boys founderRead moreMcKillips’s lawyer, Neil McElroy, said he had asked for McKillips to be released pending a 9 November detention hearing in Toledo.Teagan’s arrest on Tuesday came a week before election day. Election workers have been targeted by threats and harassment since the 2020 election, which Donald Trump has refused to admit he lost.Federal authorities have charged at least five people already this year. Election officials are concerned about conspiracy theorists signing up to work as poll watchers. Some groups that have trafficked in lies about the 2020 election are recruiting and training watchers.In Phoenix on Tuesday, a federal judge agreed to put limits on a group monitoring outdoor ballot drop boxes in Arizona.The US district court judge, Michael Liburdi, said he would issue a temporary restraining order against Clean Elections USA and also the Lions of Liberty and the Yavapai County Preparedness team, which are associated with the far-right anti-government Oath Keepers group.Those groups or anyone working with them will be barred from filming or following anyone within 75ft (23 metres) of a ballot drop box or the entrance to a building that houses one. They cannot speak to or yell at individuals within that perimeter unless spoken to first. It is the standard distance maintained around polling sites under Arizona law, but it has typically never applied to drop boxes.The order also prohibited members of the groups or agents working on their behalf from carrying firearms or wearing body armor within 250ft (76 metres) of a drop box.In Michigan, Teagan was among a dozen or so people who openly carried guns while demonstrating in January 2021 outside the state capitol in Lansing. Some promoted the “boogaloo” movement, a slang term that refers to a second US civil war.Teagan told reporters the purpose of the demonstration was “to urge a message of peace and unity to the left and right, to the members of [Black Lives Matter], to Trump supporters to Three Percenter militias to antifa”.Some boogaloo promoters insist they aren’t genuinely advocating for violence. But the movement has been linked to domestic terrorism plots.In the criminal complaint against McKillips, the FBI alleges that he made online threats including one to kill a police officer and another to kill anyone he determined to be a federal informant. The FBI also contends that McKillips provided equipment to convert rifles into machine guns.“I literally handed out machine guns in Michigan,” McKillips said in a recording, the complaint states.In September 2021, he said in a private chat group: “Ain’t got a federal badge off a corpse yet, so my time here ain’t near done yet lol.”In May this year, McKillips and another user in the Signal messaging system threatened to kill a different user in the belief the person was an informant for the FBI or Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the complaint says.In July, McKillips threatened in a Signal group to “smoke a hog”, meaning kill a police officer, if conditions worsened following a fatal police shooting in Akron, it says.McKillips frequently advocated violence against police officers, federal agents, government buildings and stores like Walmart and Target, and even threatened to blow up Facebook headquarters, the complaint says.TopicsFBIThe far rightDetroitMichiganOhioUS elections 2020US midterm elections 2022newsReuse this content More

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      Trump allies saw Clarence Thomas as key to efforts to challenge 2020 election

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      Trump allies saw Clarence Thomas as key to efforts to challenge 2020 electionEmails show ex-president’s attorney saying justice was ‘our only chance to get a favorable judicial opinion’ by 6 January In a last desperate attempt to delay or disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential race, allies of Donald Trump sought to appeal to conservative supreme court Justice Clarence Thomas, new emails show.The emails, recently obtained by the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, show that members of Trump’s legal team considered Thomas to be “key” to their efforts to overturn Georgia’s election results.“We want to frame things so that Thomas could be the one to issue some sort of stay or other circuit justice opinion saying Georgia is in legitimate doubt,” Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro wrote in an email sent on 31 December 2020. Chesebro, who is now facing the threat of potential disciplinary action over his work supporting Trump’s election denialism, argued Thomas represented “our only chance to get a favorable judicial opinion by Jan 6, which might hold up the Georgia count in Congress”.January 6 marked the day that Congress was scheduled to convene to certify Biden’s victory, but lawmakers’ work on that day was disrupted by a group of Trump’s supporters storming the Capitol. The ensuing violence resulted in the deaths of seven people, according to a bipartisan Senate report.The emails from Chesebro, which were first reported by Politico, were turned over to the January 6 committee after Trump lawyer John Eastman unsuccessfully attempted to fight a subpoena for his communications. US district judge David O Carter ruled late last month that several of Eastman’s documents should be made public, as they demonstrated how Trump’s allies participated in a “knowing misrepresentation of voter-fraud numbers in Georgia when seeking to overturn the election results in federal court”.Carter, an appointee of Bill Clinton who previously said it was “more likely than not” that Trump had committed a crime in his efforts to overturn the 2020 results, ruled that Eastman’s emails “sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud the United States”.“The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public,” Carter wrote in his decision.The newly released messages indicate that Eastman agreed with Chesboro’s plan to involve Thomas and expressed hope that a favorable ruling from the supreme court would help to “kick the Georgia legislature into gear”, potentially preventing Biden from claiming his earned electoral votes. Three counts of Georgia’s 2020 ballots confirmed that Biden defeated Trump in the battleground state by roughly 12,000 votes.The release of the emails represented only the latest legal setback for Eastman, who repeatedly invoked his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination when he testified before the January 6 committee. FBI agents seized Eastman’s phone in June, as part of a justice department investigation of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, and the Trump lawyer’s appeals to reclaim the device have failed.The latest batch of emails do not include any correspondence from Thomas, although the justice’s wife, conservative activist Ginni Thomas, has become entangled in the January 6 committee’s investigation.Thomas voluntarily spoke to January 6 investigators in late September, after her communications with Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, were made public. In her text messages with Meadows, Thomas repeatedly urged the Trump adviser to stand firm in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, even after it became clear that Biden had won.“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” Thomas wrote in a text message sent on 10 November, after news networks had called the election for Biden. “You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”Thomas also lobbied legislators in Arizona and Wisconsin, encouraging them to help overturn Biden’s victories in the two battleground states, according to emails obtained by the Washington Post earlier this year.Speaking to January 6 investigators behind closed doors, Thomas indicated that she still believes Trump’s baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, committee chair Bennie Thompson told reporters. In her opening statement before the committee, Thomas also insisted that she did not discuss efforts to overturn the election results with her husband, saying they have “an ironclad rule” not to speak about cases pending before the supreme court.“It is laughable for anyone who knows my husband to think I could influence his jurisprudence – the man is independent and stubborn, with strong character traits of independence and integrity,” Thomas said in the statement, which was obtained by the New York Times.Nonetheless, the mention of Thomas’s name in the emails between Chesebro and Eastman will likely intensify calls for the conservative justice to recuse himself from cases related to January 6. So far, those calls have gone ignored.TopicsDonald TrumpUS elections 2020US politicsUS supreme courtnewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s chilling warning for US democracy

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      The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s chilling warning for US democracy The Washington Post Watergate veteran’s 20 interviews with the now former president prove to be must-listen materialBob Woodward has witnessed more than 50 years of depredation on the Potomac. Together with Carl Bernstein, he helped push Richard Nixon out the door. Only one president, however, left the veteran Washington Post reporter fearing for the future of the republic and democracy.‘A nutso proposition’: Robert Draper on Trump, Republicans and January 6 Read moreHis latest endeavor, subtitled “Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with President Donald Trump”, is a passport to the heart of darkness. In June 2020, Trump confided: “I get people, they come up with ideas. But the ideas are mine, Bob. Want to know something? Everything is mine.” So much for the 24th Psalm: “The earth is the Lord’s.”Trump whispered and sought to draw Woodward close. The author questions, pokes and curates. But in the end, his subject is left unbowed.The Trump Tapes, an audiobook, is disturbingly relevant, an unplanned coda to Woodward’s print Trump trilogy. We hear Trump ladle out praise for Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Kim Jong-un is dear to his heart. Trump praises them for smarts, cunning and ruthlessness. He envies autocrats, seemingly wishes to join their ranks. A second term as president would provide that opportunity, Woodward argues.The tapes convincingly demonstrate that Trump knew in early 2020 that Covid posed a mortal danger to the US, but balked at telling the whole truth. His re-election hung in the balance.By the time Trump delivered his State of the Union address to Congress in February 2020, his national security team had delivered a stark warning. Yet Trump soft-pedaled the danger until his final months in office. Covid deaths in Republican America grew to outpace fatalities in Democratic states.Robert O’Brien, Trump’s national security adviser, and Matthew Pottinger, his deputy, confirmed to Woodward that they warned Trump the coronavirus would be “the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency”. They expected the devastation to be brutal, akin to the flu epidemic of 1918.Trump tacitly acknowledges receiving their message but does not dwell on Covid’s downside. He did not see it as his primary responsibility.In February 2020, Trump assured Woodward that everything was OK in the US, adding “now we got a little bit of a setback with the China virus”. He added that Covid would “go away in a couple of months with the heat”. In summer 2020, asked if this were “the leadership test of a lifetime”, Trump offered an emphatic “no”.He bragged of the US nuclear arsenal. “I have built a weapon system that nobody’s ever had in this country before,” Trump said. “We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before.”The tapes again demonstrate that Trump holds the press in contempt but yearns for its approval. Trump flatters his interviewer as “a great historian” and “the great Bob Woodward”. His tropism toward Woodward and Maggie Haberman is of the same piece. Woodward doubled as de facto White House stenographer and chronicler, Haberman as psychiatrist. Trump would call without warning. Woodward scattered devices around his home, to record such conversations.In the end, Trump smashed history’s clock. The US stands changed, possibly forever.“There is no turning back for American politics,” Woodward observes. “Trump was and still is a huge force and indelible presence, with the most powerful political machine in the country. He has the largest group of followers, loyalists and fundraisers, exceeding that of even President Biden.”Our divisions are unlikely to recede, Woodward worries. Trump better intuited where America stood in 2016 than any of his rivals. He grasped the impact of free trade, opioids and death by despair. He validated his base and relished his capacity to enrage. In the process, he obliterated the Republican legacy as the party of Abraham Lincoln and made the GOP his own.Woodward acknowledges the power of Trump’s instincts. On tape, Trump places himself on par with the 16th president and claims to have outshone Lyndon Johnson and the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.“No, I’ve done more,” he bristles, when pressed.Not surprisingly, Woodward and Trump spar over culture. A son of an Illinois state judge, a graduate of Yale, Woodward asserts that he and Trump are beneficiaries of white privilege. Woodward served in the navy, Trump dodged Vietnam. Trump refuses to have any of it. He says Woodward’s formulation is not part of his worldview.Maggie Haberman on Trump: ‘He’s become a Charles Foster Kane character’Read moreWoodward also focuses on the anger unleashed by the murder of George Floyd. Trump revisits the ensuing riots. From the left, the slogan “Defund the police” is a gift that keeps on giving for Republicans. This election cycle, law and order appears to be the winning message – as it was in 1968, 1972, 1988 and 2016. Latino voters and Asian Americans drift to the GOP.If Trump seeks the 2024 Republican nomination the crown will likely be his, together with excellent odds for re-election. Joe Biden’s ratings lumber. A criminal indictment might even burnish Trump’s allure to the faithful, albeit a conviction would be a wholly different matter.Biden has ignored the cold fact that his election came with a singular mandate: that he not act like his predecessor – nothing more. Instead, the 46th president fashioned himself as FDR 2.0, striving to usher in a second New Deal via razor-thin Democratic margins in Congress.On 8 November 2022, America will deliver a midterm verdict. Weeks later, Biden will turn 80. The country will be watching. So will an eager Trump and a vexed Woodward. No one said democracy was easy.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpAudiobooksCoronavirusUS elections 2020Politics booksUS domestic policyreviewsReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      Trump aide Mark Meadows must testify before Georgia grand jury, judge orders

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      Trump aide Mark Meadows must testify before Georgia grand jury, judge ordersTrump’s former chief of staff must answer questions about alleged attempt to overturn 2020 election result A judge on Wednesday ordered the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to testify before a special grand jury investigating whether Donald Trump and his allies illegally tried to overturn Georgia’s results in the 2020 election.Trump’s ex-chief of staff Mark Meadows complies with January 6 subpoenaRead moreMeadows is a key figure in the investigation. He traveled to Georgia, sat in on calls with state officials and coordinated and communicated with influencers either encouraging or discouraging the pressure campaign.The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, opened the investigation last year. Meadows is just one of several Trump associates and advisers whose testimony Willis has sought.Because Meadows does not live in Georgia, Willis, a Democrat, had to get a judge where he lives, in South Carolina, to order him to appear. Edward Miller, a circuit court judge in Pickens county, ordered Meadows to testify, a Willis spokesperson confirmed.Meadows’s attorney, Jim Bannister, said his client was “weighing all options” including appeals.“Nothing final until we see the order,” he said.Willis has been fighting similar battles in courts around the US. An appeals court in Texas has indicated it may not recognize the validity of the Georgia summonses. Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, asked the US supreme court to intervene after a federal appeals court ordered him to testify.In the petition seeking Meadows’s testimony, Willis wrote that he attended a 21 December 2020 meeting with Trump and others “to discuss allegations of voter fraud and certification of electoral college votes from Georgia and other states”.The next day, Willis wrote, Meadows made a “surprise visit” to Cobb county, just outside Atlanta, where an audit of signatures on absentee ballot envelopes was being conducted. He asked to observe but was not allowed to because the audit was not open to the public, the petition says.Meadows also sent emails to justice department officials alleging voter fraud in Georgia and elsewhere and requesting investigations, Willis wrote. And he took part in a 2 January 2021 call with the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, during which Trump suggested Raffensperger “find” enough votes to overturn the president’s loss in the state.According to a transcript of the call, Meadows said Trump’s team believed that “not every vote or fair vote and legal vote was counted. And that’s at odds with the representation from the secretary of state’s office.” He also said he hoped they could agree on a way “to look at this a little bit more fully”. Raffensperger disputed the assertions.After the election, Meadows was widely seen in the White House as a chief instigator of Trump’s fixation on the election, passing along conspiracies about fraud other officials were forced to swat down. He pushed one theory that people in Italy had changed votes in the US with satellite technology, a claim the former justice department official Richard Donoghue labeled “pure insanity”.In a court filing this week, Meadows’s lawyer argued that executive privilege and other rights shield his client from testifying.Bannister asserted that Meadows has been instructed by Trump “to preserve certain privileges and immunities attaching to his former office as White House chief of staff”. Willis’s petition calls for him “to divulge the contents of executive privileged communications with the president”, Bannister wrote.Meadows also invoked that privilege in a fight against subpoenas issued by the House January 6 committee. Meadows has been fighting investigations of the Capitol attack and has avoided having to testify. He turned over thousands of texts to the House committee before refusing an interview.The House held Meadows in contempt of Congress but the justice department declined to prosecute.Special grand juries in Georgia cannot issue indictments. Instead, they can gather evidence and compel testimony and recommend further action, including criminal charges. It is up to the district attorney to decide whether to seek an indictment from a regular grand jury.TopicsGeorgiaTrump administrationUS elections 2020newsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Two Chinese spies charged with trying to obstruct US Huawei investigation, Garland says – as it happened

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      Two Chinese intelligence agents have been charged with attempting to disrupt the prosecution of a Chinese telecommunications firm, US attorney general Merrick Garland has announced.While he did not name the company, the Associated Press reports it is likely Huawei, the giant Chinese manufacturer of cellphones, routers and other communications devices.“Over the past week, the justice department has taken several actions to disrupt criminal activity by individuals working on behalf of the government of the People’s Republic of China,” Garland said in a speech.He announced charges against “two PRC intelligence officers with attempting to obstruct influence and impede a criminal prosecution of a PRC-based telecommunications company.”Here’s more on the case from the AP:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The two men, Guochun He and Zheng Wang, are accused of trying to direct a person with the U.S. government whom they believed was a cooperator to provide confidential information about the Justice Department’s investigation, including about witnesses, trial evidence and potential new charges. One of the defendants paid about $61,000 for the information, the Justice Department said.
      The person the men reached out to began working as a double agent for the U.S government, and his contact with the defendants was overseen by the FBI.
      The company is not named in the charging documents, though the references make clear that it’s Huawei, which was charged in 2019 with bank fraud and again the following year with new charges of racketeering conspiracy and a plot to steal trade secrets. The justice department announced charges in three cases alleging Chinese intelligence officers attempted to steal technology, pressured a naturalized US citizen to return to the country and interfered with the prosecution of telecommunications giant Huawei, while warning Beijing against continued wrongdoing in the United States. Meanwhile, a prominent journalist who interviewed Trump 20 times warned he wasn’t only dangerous for democracy, he was also incompetent.Here’s what else happened today:
      Polls show tight races for Senate in Ohio and Wisconsin, and a Democrat in the lead in Pennsylvania as the party hopes to maintain its majority in Congress’ upper chamber.
      Supreme court justice Samuel Alito told a top Democratic senator he considered Roe v Wade settled law during his confirmation hearing in 2005 – then voted to overturn it 17 years later.
      Areas represented in Congress by 2020 election deniers tend to have seen their white population share decline, and be less well off and well educated than elsewhere, a New York Times analysis found.
      Republican senator Lindsey Graham’s subpoena compelling his appearance before a special grand jury investigating the campaign to meddle with Georgia’s election results two years ago is on hold thanks to conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas.
      Almost 17 years before he wrote the supreme court’s opinion overturning Roe v Wade, Samuel Alito told a prominent Democratic senator he considered the case guaranteeing abortion access nationwide settled law, The New York Times reports.“I am a believer in precedents”, Alito, then a federal judge, told Edward Kennedy. In a reference to one of the core justifications for the original Roe decision, he told Kennedy, “I recognize there is a right to privacy,” and “I think it’s settled.”The new details were taken from Kennedy’s private diary, portions of which will be published in the book “Ted Kennedy: A Life” set for release Tuesday, and reported by the Times. The senator was skeptical of Alito’s repeated statements indicating he wouldn’t try to overturn Roe, and also didn’t buy Alito’s explanation that he had written a memo outlining his opposition to Roe because he was seeking a promotion while working as a lawyer in the administration of Republican president Ronald Reagan. Kennedy voted against confirming Alito to the supreme court, and died in 2009. Last June, Alito helmed the five-justice majority that overturned Roe, and allowed states to ban abortion completely – in an apparent contradiction of what he told Kennedy.The state department has responded to the letter from progressive lawmakers urging the Biden administration to redouble efforts to find a negotiated solution to the war in Ukraine.According to CNN, the department’s spokesman Ned Price said Ukraine would be willing to engage in dialogue with Russia, but Moscow appears unwilling. Here’s more from his briefing:State Dept spokesperson Ned Price’s response to this today: “In order for diplomacy to take place, there have to be parties ready and willing to engage in diplomacy. Right now, we have heard from our Ukrainian partners repeatedly that this war will only end through diplomacy… https://t.co/jRkkGqtRcd— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) October 24, 2022
      …and dialogue. We have not heard any reciprocal statement or refrain from Moscow that they are ready in good faith to engage in that diplomacy and dialogue.”— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) October 24, 2022
      Hugo Lowell was at Merrick Garland’s press conference in Washington earlier and is filing updates to his Guardian report, which you can find here. Hugo’s report begins…Two Chinese intelligence officers tried to bribe a US law enforcement official as part of an effort to obtain inside information about a criminal case against the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei, federal prosecutors alleged in an indictment unsealed on Monday.The move to unmask the espionage operation – and charge the two agents with obstruction of justice – amounts to an escalation by the US justice department after it accused Huawei in February 2020 of conducting racketeering and conspiracy to steal trade secrets.“This was an egregious attempt by PRC intelligence officers to shield a PRC-based company from accountability and to undermine the integrity of our judicial system,” the attorney general Merrick Garland said at a news conference unveiling the indictment.The report in full:US accuses Chinese spies of plot to steal secrets in Huawei investigationRead moreIssue One Action, a “nonpartisan advocacy organization dedicated to uniting Republicans, Democrats and independents in the fight to fix our broken political system”, has released a report in which it names “the nine most dangerous anti-democracy candidates running to administer US elections”.Included are Jim Marchant of Nevada, running for secretary of state; Mark Finchem of Arizona, running for secretary of state; and Doug Mastriano of Pennsylvania, running for governor.For a story published by Guardian US today, Adam Gabbatt went to Pennsylvania to look at Mastriano’s campaign. He writes:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Mastriano is, by most measures, an extremist.
      As a state senator in Pennsylvania, he said women who violated a proposed six-week abortion ban should be charged with murder. Mastriano frequently attacks trans people, and has said gay marriage should be illegal, and that same-sex couples should not be allowed to adopt children.
      At an event this summer, organized by a pair of self-described prophets, Mastriano told his supporters: “We have the power of God with us.” He added that Jesus Christ is “guiding and directing our steps”. While working at the Army War College, an academy for military members, Mastriano posed for a faculty photo wearing a Confederate uniform.
      And as a key schemer in Trump’s bid to overturn the presidential election, Mastriano spent thousands of dollars chartering buses to Washington DC on January 6, where images showed him close to the violence as Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol.
      None of this stopped Mastriano, who was endorsed by Trump, from winning the Republican nomination for governor in May.Here’s Adam’s full piece:Doug Mastriano: is the Trump-backed election denier too extreme to win?Read moreSwitching focus for a moment from China to Ukraine, 30 liberal Democrats in Congress have signed a letter to Joe Biden, in which they call for Joe Biden to change course on the matter of the Russian invasion, to couple current economic and military support for Kyiv with a “proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire”.The lawmakers continue:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}This is consistent with your recognition that ‘there’s going to have to be a negotiated settlement here’, and your concern that Vladimir Putin ‘doesn’t have a way out right now, and I’m trying to figure out what we do about that.’ .css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}We are under no illusions regarding the difficulties involved in engaging Russia given its outrageous and illegal invasion of Ukraine and its decision to make additional illegal annexations of Ukrainian territory. However, if there is a way to end the war while preserving a free and independent Ukraine, it is America’s responsibility to pursue every diplomatic avenue to support such a solution that is acceptable to the people of Ukraine.The signatories are led by Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and prominent progressives including Cori Bush, Ro Khanna, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamie Raskin.As the Washington Post points out, “the appeal for a shift in strategy comes amid some of the most significant US-Russian diplomatic engagement in some time, as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently talked with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, for the first time in months. The two spoke by phone Friday and again on Sunday at Shoigu’s request, Austin wrote on Twitter.”Austin said he “rejected any pretext for Russian escalation & reaffirmed the value of continued communication amid Russia’s unlawful & unjustified war against Ukraine”.The Chinese government’s alleged misdeeds go beyond attempts to counter the prosecution of Huawei. Garland announced charges in two other cases – one involving technology theft and intimidation, and the other involving a pressure campaign to get a naturalized US citizen to return to China against his will.In the first, federal prosecutors in New Jersey indicted four people, including three Chinese intelligence officers, with using “the cover of a purported Chinese academic institute to target, co-opt and direct individuals in the United States to further the PRC intelligence mission” over 10 years from 2008, Garland said.They also attempted “to procure technology and equipment from the United States and to have it shipped to China,” and “stop protected First Amendment activities, protests here in the United States, which would have been embarrassing for the Chinese government,” Garland said.The second case involves seven people charged with undertaking “a multi-year campaign of threats and harassment to force a US resident to return to China,” Garland said. Two of the individuals indicted in the eastern district of New York were arrested yesterday, he said.“Defendants threatened the victim saying that, ‘coming back and turning herself in is the only way out,’” Garland said. “They showed up at the home of the victim’s son in New York. They filed frivolous lawsuits against the victim and his son and said it would be ‘endless misery for the defendant and son to defend themselves.’ And they made clear that their harassment would not stop until the victim returned to China.”“These cases demonstrate the government of China sought to interfere with the rights and freedoms of individuals in the United States and to undermine our judicial system that protects those rights,” Garland said. “The Justice Department will not tolerate attempts by any foreign power to undermine the rule of law upon which our democracy is based.”Two Chinese intelligence agents have been charged with attempting to disrupt the prosecution of a Chinese telecommunications firm, US attorney general Merrick Garland has announced.While he did not name the company, the Associated Press reports it is likely Huawei, the giant Chinese manufacturer of cellphones, routers and other communications devices.“Over the past week, the justice department has taken several actions to disrupt criminal activity by individuals working on behalf of the government of the People’s Republic of China,” Garland said in a speech.He announced charges against “two PRC intelligence officers with attempting to obstruct influence and impede a criminal prosecution of a PRC-based telecommunications company.”Here’s more on the case from the AP:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The two men, Guochun He and Zheng Wang, are accused of trying to direct a person with the U.S. government whom they believed was a cooperator to provide confidential information about the Justice Department’s investigation, including about witnesses, trial evidence and potential new charges. One of the defendants paid about $61,000 for the information, the Justice Department said.
      The person the men reached out to began working as a double agent for the U.S government, and his contact with the defendants was overseen by the FBI.
      The company is not named in the charging documents, though the references make clear that it’s Huawei, which was charged in 2019 with bank fraud and again the following year with new charges of racketeering conspiracy and a plot to steal trade secrets. President Joe Biden is right now speaking at Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, where he’s warning about the consequences of a Republican takeover of Congress.Here’s the latest from Politico’s reporter on the scene:Fifteen days before the midterms, President Biden visits DNC headquarters in Washington and acknowledges that his party is running “against the tide” and casts doubt on the polls – but predicts a final surge for the Democrats pic.twitter.com/cMr6efUqi4— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) October 24, 2022
      More Biden at DNC, about Republicans:”They’ll shut down the government, they say, and send the nation into default, which raises the price for everyone if we do not cut social security and Medicare. *dramatically whispers*”I ain’t going to do it.”— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) October 24, 2022
      There’s a reason why Biden and the Democrats are quick to mention Social Security and Medicare. The two programs are relied by older Americans, who tend to be reliable voters, and any changes to them are considered politically perilous.Six years ago, liberal documentary filmmaker Michael Moore correctly predicted Donald Trump’s election win. Today, he’s calling the upcoming midterms for the Democrats, and explains why in an interview with The Guardian’s Edward Helmore:For the past month, Academy Award-winning documentary maker Michael Moore has been emailing out a daily missive “Mike’s Midterm Tsunami of Truth” on why he believes Democrats will win big in America’s midterm elections next month.Moore calls it “a brief honest daily dose of the truth – and the real optimism these truths offer us”. It also – at this moment in time – flies in the face of most political punditry, which sees a Republican win on the cards.Making predictions is a risky undertaking in any election cycle, but especially in this round with Democrats banking they can hitch Republican candidates to an unpopular supreme court decision to overturn federal guarantees of a woman’s right to abortion. Republicans, meanwhile, are laser-focused on high inflation rates, economic troubles and fears over crime rates.But political forecasting has become Moore’s business since he correctly called that Donald Trump would win the national elections in 2016 against common judgment of the media and pollsters businesses.The thrust of his reasoning that this will be “Roe-vember” is amplified daily in the emails. In missive #21 (Don’t Believe It) on Tuesday, he addressed the issue of political fatalism, specifically the media narrative that the party in power necessarily does poorly in midterm elections.“The effect of this kind of reporting can be jarring – it can get inside the average American’s head and scramble it,” Moore wrote. “You can start to feel deflated. You want to quit. You start believing that we liberals are a bunch of losers. And by thinking of ourselves this way, if you’re not careful, you begin to manifest the old narrative into existence.”‘I’m deadly serious’: why film-maker Michael Moore is confident of a Democratic midterm winRead moreWe’re awaiting an announcement from attorney general Merrick Garland about a “significant national security matter” that could involve another country. He’s set to speak alongside FBI director Christopher Wray at a press conference beginning at 1:30 pm eastern time.Here’s what else has happened today:
      Polls show tight races for Senate in Ohio and Wisconsin, and a Democrat in the lead in Pennsylvania as the party hopes to maintain its majority in Congress’ upper chamber.
      Areas represented in Congress by 2020 election deniers tend to have seen their white population decline, and be less well-off and well educated than elsewhere, a New York Times analysis found.
      Republican senator Lindsey Graham’s subpoena compelling his appearance before a special grand jury investigating the campaign to meddle with Georgia’s election results two years ago is on hold thanks to conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas.
      Rightwing supreme court justice Clarence Thomas has placed a temporary hold on a Georgia grand jury’s subpoena compelling the testimony of Republican senator Lindsey Graham as part of its investigation into efforts by Donald Trump’s allies to meddle in the state’s election results:BREAKING: Justice Clarence Thomas, acting unilaterally, issues a “shadow docket” ruling for Sen. Lindsey Graham, agreeing to temporarily halt Graham from testifying in probe of pro-Trump election interference in Georgia— John Kruzel (@johnkruzel) October 24, 2022
      Thomas is one of the court’s most conservative justices, but the move is not unusual, according to CNN supreme court analyst Steve Vladeck:To be clear, Justice Thomas issued an “administrative stay,” which blocks the Eleventh Circuit ruling only temporarily while the full Court decides whether to block it pending appeal.Such a ruling is *not* predictive of how the full Court (or even Thomas) will vote on the stay. https://t.co/CSrBaDg9JP— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) October 24, 2022
      Indeed, there are lots of recent examples of the Circuit Justice issuing such a temporary ruling and then the full Court *declining* to make it permanent.Folks will surely overreact anyway, but this isn’t a big deal — yet.— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) October 24, 2022
      Appeals court pauses order for Graham to testify before Atlanta grand juryRead moreThe Democrats’ two best hopes for stemming their losses in the Senate or even expanding their majority are in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and CNN has just released a poll indicating tight races in both.The states are home to the perhaps two best pick up opportunities for Democrats this year, with Republican senator Ron Johnson defending his seat in Wisconsin, while Pennsylvania’s is vacant after GOP senator Pat Toomey opted to retire.CNN’s new poll indicates Johnson has a slight edge over Democrat Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin, where 50% of voters back his candidacy against 49% for his challenger.In Pennsylvania, Democratic lieutenant governor John Fetterman is at 51% support against Republican Mehmet Oz, who was polling at 45%.The poll otherwise confirmed dynamics that have become well-known this election cycle. The economy is far and away voters’ top issue, with abortion a distant second. President Joe Biden is also unpopular with voters in both states, the survey finds.Districts whose congressional representatives have embraced conspiracy theories about the 2020 election tend to be poorer, less educated and have experienced declines in their white population, according to an analysis published by The New York Times today.The report suggests that racial anxiety is a major factor in voters’ willingness to embrace Donald Trump’s baseless claims of fraud in Joe Biden’s election win, in addition to economic stagnation and social maladies like the opioid epidemic. The report is a sprawling look at corners of the country that have grown so alienated they’re willing to support lawmakers who object to the certification of the 2020 election, despite fears the campaign poses a mortal threat to American democracy.Here’s more from the Times:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}When Representative Troy Nehls of Texas voted last year to reject Donald J. Trump’s electoral defeat, many of his constituents back home in Fort Bend County were thrilled.
      Like the former president, they have been unhappy with the changes unfolding around them. Crime and sprawl from Houston, the big city next door, have been spilling over into their once bucolic towns. (“Build a wall,” Mr. Nehls likes to say, and make Houston pay.) The county in recent years has become one of the nation’s most diverse, where the former white majority has fallen to just 30 percent of the population.
      Don Demel, a 61-year-old salesman who turned out last month to pick up a signed copy of a book by Mr. Nehls about the supposedly stolen election, said his parents had raised him “colorblind.” But the reason for the discontent was clear: Other white people in Fort Bend “did not like certain people coming here,” he said. “It’s race. They are old-school.”
      A shrinking white share of the population is a hallmark of the congressional districts held by the House Republicans who voted to challenge Mr. Trump’s defeat, a New York Times analysis found — a pattern political scientists say shows how white fear of losing status shaped the movement to keep him in power.
      The portion of white residents dropped about 35 percent more over the last three decades in those districts than in territory represented by other Republicans, the analysis found, and constituents also lagged behind in income and education. Rates of so-called deaths of despair, such as suicide, drug overdose and alcohol-related liver failure, were notably higher as well.The January 6 committee is likely finished with its public hearings into the deadly attack on the Capitol, and The Guardian’s Tom Ambrose surveyed readers about whether the committee’s work changed their mind about what happened that day, and Trump’s role in it. Here’s what one had to say:I think that hearings solidified what most people thought already: that Donald Trump and his allies coordinated to assault the foundations of democracy on January 6 because they were unhappy with the result of the 2020 election. The juxtaposing of previously aired and unaired video clips helped provide clearer and fuller picture of the chaos that unfolded that day.I believe that anyone who tuned into the hearings with an open mind saw January 6 for what it was: a disgraceful attack on American democracy that amounts to treason. I believe the committee was convincing in their effort to show premeditation by the president and his followers.I am worried that those who believe January 6 was justified will use this committee as an example as of how “the Democrats/liberals” are out to get the president and his followers. They demonstrate this belief daily as they continue to call for violence against elected officials and refuse to believe the truth that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.It feels like that their position is: either we won, or we were cheated. I fear that the upcoming elections in November will only be a taste of what kinds of vitriol await during the 2024 election. Patrick, 29, public school teacher from Chicago‘Trump should be held accountable’: Guardian readers on the Capitol attack hearingsRead more More