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      The Presidency of Donald Trump review: the first draft of history

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      The Presidency of Donald Trump review: the first draft of history Julian Zelizer of Princeton has assembled a cast of historians to consider every aspect of four years that shook AmericaAfter thousands of articles and scores of books about Donald Trump’s mostly catastrophic presidency, it’s difficult for anyone to break dramatic new ground. But this new volume, with contributions from 18 American academics, is broader and deeper than all its predecessors, with essays covering everything from Militant Whiteness to the legacy of Trump’s Middle East policies, under the title Arms, Autocrats and Annexations.The result is a great deal of information that is familiar to those who have already plowed through dozens of volumes, enlivened by a few new facts and a number of original insights.One of the best essays, about the Republican party Trump inherited, is written by the book’s editor, Julian Zelizer. The Princeton historian reminds us that the “smashmouth partisanship” perfected by Trump actually began when Newt Gingrich snared the House speakership nearly 30 years ago. In 1992, Pat Buchanan’s speech to the Republic convention featured all of the gay-bashing Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, (and may other Republicans) have revived with so much gusto in 2022.Trump swooped in to profit from White House photographer’s book deal – reportRead moreWith major contributions from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the rightwing media machine, most of the GOP moved so far right it didn’t become Trump’s party because he “seized control” but rather because “he fit so perfectly” with it. Most Republicans were “all in” for Trump, from Mitt Romney, the ex-never Trumper who voted with his former nemesis more than 80% of the time, to “moderate” Chris Christie, who gave Trump an “A” four months after his four years of scorched-earth governance were over.Nicole Hemmer, from Columbia, offers an excellent primer on the irresistible rise of rightwing media, reminding us that in the last year of the first George Bush presidency, Limbaugh was spending the night at the White House. By 2009, the shock jock “topped polls asking who led the Republican party”.By the time Trump started his run for the presidency, in 2015, he had “grown far more powerful than the political media ecosystem that had boosted his rightwing bona fides”. This became clear after his dust-up with Megyn Kelly. Moderating a primary debate, the Fox anchor challenged his long history of sexist statements. Trump declared afterwards: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”The Fox News chief, Roger Ailes, “stayed silent”, Hemmer writes. Another executive, Bill Shine, “told on-air anchors not to come to Kelly’s defense”.By the spring of 2016, Fox was becoming less important than Breitbart, an extreme-right website which researchers at Harvard and MIT declared the new anchor of a “rightwing media network”. It was Steve Bannon of Breitbart who “armed Trump with something like a cohesive political platform … built on anti-immigrant, anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and anti-liberal politics – the same agenda Breitbart.com was promoting”.“Sure enough”, Trump’s Twitter feed “during the campaign linked to Breitbart more than any other news site”.Eventually, just about everyone on the right became a Trump disciple. Glenn Beck compared him to Hitler in 2016. By 2018, Beck was wearing a red Make America Great Again hat, though he blamed the media’s “Trump Derangement Syndrome” for “forcing him to become a Trump supporter”. As a former rightwing radio host, Charlie Sykes, explained: “There’s really not a business model for conservative media to be anti-Trump.”A Brown historian, Bathsheba Demuth, demonstrates that Trump was also a perfect fit for a party that endorsed a propaganda initiative of the American Petroleum Institute that portrayed environmental protection as “a dangerous slide toward communist authoritarianism”. Among loyal constituents were evangelicals, who either saw human dominion over nature as “a doctrinal requirement” or just thought the whole debate was irrelevant because of “Christ’s imminent resurrection”.The most surprising fact in this chapter is that the fossil fuel industry was so sure Trump was a loser in 2016, it gave the bulk of its contributions to Hillary Clinton.Margaret O’Mara, of the University of Washington, describes big tech’s key role in our national meltdown. She reminds us of a key, mostly forgotten moment 10 years ago, when “Google and Facebook successfully petitioned the Federal Election Commission for exemptions from disclaimer requirements” that required political ads to say who paid for them and who was responsible for their messages.The companies argued the requirements would “undermine other, much larger parts of their businesses”. Disastrously, the FEC went along with that pathetic argument. After that, no one ever knew exactly where online attack ads were coming from.O’Mara also recalls that Facebook provided the 2016 Trump campaign with “dedicated staff and resources” to help it purchase more ads on the platform. O’Mara mistakenly reports that the Clinton campaign received the same kind of largesse. Actually, in what may have been the campaign’s single worst decision, it refused Facebook’s offer to install staffers in Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters.Dignity in a Digital Age review: a congressman takes big tech to taskRead moreAnother chapter, by Daniel C Kurtzer of Princeton, analyses what Trump supporters consider their president’s greatest foreign policy achievement: the initiation of diplomatic relations between Israel and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan and Morocco.A conservative journal summarized the accomplishment this way: “Washington is strengthening repression in Bahrain, underwriting aggression by UAE, sacrificing the Sahrawi people [of Western Sahara, to Morocco], undermining reform in Sudan and even abandoning justice for Americans harmed by Sudan. The administration calls this an ‘American first’ policy.”The last chapter focuses on the two failed attempts to convict Trump in impeachment trials. Those outcomes may be Trump’s worst legacy of all. Gregory Downs, from the University of California, Davis, writes that the failures to convict “in the face of incontrovertible proof” may convince all Trump’s successors “that they have almost complete impunity as long as they retain the support of their base, no matter what the constitution says”.
      The Presidency of Donald Trump is published in the US by Princeton University Press
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      The latest threat to democracy? A Trump-backed candidate willing to ‘find extra votes’

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      The latest threat to democracy? A Trump-backed candidate willing to ‘find extra votes’ Kristina Karamo is running for Michigans’s chief elections officer, and if she wins she would have considerable sway over how the presidential election is conducted in 2024Donald Trump will return to Michigan on Saturday for his first visit since November 2020 when he spent the final hours of his presidential election campaign desperately trying to hold on to the state and fend off nationwide defeat to his Democratic rival Joe Biden.This time his visit will be motivated by an attempt to forge a path to victory in the 2024 presidential election, in which he has hinted he may run again. If that is his intention, he is going about it in a very irregular fashion.Revealed: Trump used White House phone for call on January 6 that was not on official logRead moreHis guest of honor at the rally he is staging in Washington Township will be bear no resemblance to the local politicians whom former US presidents normally champion. Kristina Karamo is a part-time community college professor who has never held elected office and who up until 18 months ago was relatively little known outside conservative and religious circles in the Detroit suburb in which she lives.Karamo, 36, describes herself as a defender of the Christian faith and espouses some arresting beliefs. She opposes teaching evolution and has called public schools “government indoctrination camps”; she argues that many Americans live in poverty because “they just make dumb decisions”; and she contends that the instigators of the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol were “totally antifa posing as Trump supporters”.There are two clues as to why Trump is willing to make the 1,200-mile schlepp from his home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, to chilly Michigan on Karamo’s behalf. The first is the position for which she is standing in November’s midterm elections – secretary of state.The post-holder acts as chief elections officer in Michigan, and in that capacity will have considerable sway over how the presidential election is conducted in 2024. What happens in the state could then in turn have enormous national implications: in both 2016 and 2020 Michigan was pivotal in securing the White House for Trump and Biden respectively.The second clue to Trump’s thinking is the language he used when he endorsed her last September. “She is strong on crime,” he said, “including the massive crime of election fraud”.What initially drew Karamo to Trump’s attention was the prominent role she played in Michigan in promoting his “big lie”, the false conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from him. From almost total obscurity, Karamo was thrown into the limelight when she began to cry foul about what she claimed was illegal vote counting in the overwhelmingly African American city of Detroit.It all began with a basic misunderstanding.As America held its breath in the days after the election, when it remained uncertain whether Biden or Trump would win, Karamo relocated herself to the TCF Center in downtown Detroit where poll workers were counting 174,000 absentee ballots. Karamo was one of scores of Trump supporters who – without any formal training in election procedures or laws – designated themselves as “poll challengers” watching over the politically-charged count.The convention space was packed to overflowing, with about 900 poll workers counting ballots, as another 400 or so media and political observers looked on. Over the next 24 hours, TCF began to resemble, in the description of the Detroit Free Press, a high-stakes sports match “complete with yelling, taunting, cheering, fists pounding on glass and unruly challengers being hauled off by cops”.Amid the melee, Karamo claimed that she personally witnessed fraudulent activity in which ballots were switched illegally from Trump to Biden. A week after the election, by which time Biden had been declared winner, she filled out an “incident report” in her neat closely-spaced handwriting.The three-page document looks like an official police report, though the small print at the bottom says: “Paid for by Donald J Trump for President, Inc.” In it, Karamo gives her account of what she claims to have witnessed.She was standing at an “adjudication table” where ballots that are incorrectly filled in are scrutinized. She spotted a ballot on the screen in which a voter appeared to have cast their ballot along straight-party lines but for both main parties.That was clearly an error as you can’t vote for more than one presidential candidate at a time.Karamo says in the “incident report” that she watched as a poll worker unilaterally decided to award the ballot to Biden, no questions asked. When she complained and called for a supervisor, she claims she was told not to talk to the election staff.The supervisor, she wrote, instructed the poll worker “to ‘push it through’, when the ballot legally should have been rejected. I said I’m challenging the ballot… but he continued to tell the worker to push it through.”That sounds like a blatant abuse of election integrity, taking an effectively spoiled ballot and counting it for Biden. Karamo was incensed, and on the back of that eruption of anger began her meteoric rise as an advocate for Trump’s big lie that the election was rigged.The problem was that Karamo’s interpretation of what happened to the wrongly-completed ballot was based on a simple misreading of election procedure. Chris Thomas, Michigan’s former director of elections who oversaw the state’s vote counts for 36 years under both Republican and Democratic administrations, told the Guardian why.He explained that when Karamo heard “push it through” she assumed that meant “give the vote to Biden”. But that was a misunderstanding.In fact, the edict “push it through” when issued at the adjudication table is in effect an order to discard “overvotes” – ballots like the one Karamo witnessed where more than the maximum number of candidates are selected.“‘Push it through’ means you are done with it, and the vote is tabulated as a non-count,” Thomas said.In other words, the call to fraudulently count the ballot for Biden which Karamo thought she had heard was in fact an instruction to place the vote in the electronic equivalent of a dustbin where it would be stored but discounted.What did Thomas make of the fact that Karamo made a hue and cry about fraud based on a mistaken interpretation of electoral practices? “This is the problem when people make all these comments when they don’t understand the system,” he said. “They see what they want to see.”Thomas was present inside the TCF Center for the duration of the two-day count, working as a senior consultant and handling disputes. With his almost four decades of non-partisan experience of orchestrating elections, how would he rate the way the ballots were handled inside the space?“The count was totally above board,” he said. “It was accurate and it was fair. The count was good.”That one mistaken claim of fraud propelled Karamo into the dizzy heights of the Trump firmament. Sean Hannity billed her as a “whistleblower” on his primetime Fox News show, she was invited by Republicans to testify before a legislative committee, she participated in a four-state lawsuit seeking to overturn the presidential election result that went all the way up to the US supreme court (which promptly rejected it).Emboldened, her baseless critique of rampant election fraud became more forthright. “I was a poll challenger at TCF Center in Detroit,” she told the podcast Coffee and a Mike. “I saw illegal activity and I realized if we don’t cure our election system we no longer have a republic, we have a fake country, an illusion of a country, so I have to do something.”That “something” was to stand for Michigan secretary of state – a position that would potentially allow her to take her discredited views on voter fraud and use them to Trump’s advantage in 2024. So far, she is doing very well in the race, with a credible shot at prevailing.With Trump’s enthusiastic backing, she has amassed a campaign war-chest of more than $228,000, more than any other Republican vying for the secretary of state nomination. As an indication of how much heat the race is generating, Karamo has attracted more than 2,000 individual donors – more than all candidates combined in the last secretary of state contest in 2018.Michigan’s incumbent secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, is running for re-election as the Democratic candidate. She told the Guardian that the steam that has built up around the race this year is an indication of its high stakes.“This secretary of state race is the top targeted race in the country, and I am the top targeted incumbent secretary of state seeking re-election this year. Trump’s decision to endorse someone running against me, and his rally on Saturday, are a warning that what is unfolding here should be on everyone’s radar – democracy is on the ballot in November,” Benson said.Benson was in charge of the presidential election count in Michigan in 2020, which Biden won by 154,188 votes. She believes Karamo was present in the TCF Center “simply for the purpose of interfering with the counting process, causing chaos and confusion and spreading misinformation”.Asked what would happen if the Trump-supporting conspiracy theorist won in November and took her job, Benson replied: “Michigan would have a chief election officer more than willing to find those extra votes if the candidate asked them. It would be akin to putting an arsonist in charge of the fire department, or giving the keys to the vault to a bank robber.”As the secretary of state contest gains momentum, progressive groups are mobilizing to try and stop Karamo. The left-leaning End Citizens United/Let America Vote has launched a new “democracy defender program”, investing $7m in secretary of state and attorney general races where Trump-endorsed big lie candidates are on the ticket.“Karamo sought to silence and overturn the will of Michigan voters. Her false and extreme rhetoric is a threat to democracy because it undermines faith in our elections,” said a spokesperson for the group, Tina Olechowski.The Guardian reached out to Karamo, but she did not respond.As the race hots up she continues to claim that Trump won the 2020 election and to demand a “forensic audit” of the results – even though “forensic audits” do not exist under Michigan election law. In October she spoke at a QAnon convention in Las Vegas where she joined other pro-Trump big lie candidates running for secretary of state positions around the country.“She was one of several political candidates appealing to QAnon for political gain in ways that could have a drastic impact on future elections,” said Alex Kaplan, senior researcher at the watchdog Media Matters for America.Karamo has said that if she wins in November, her role as secretary of state will be “to make sure elections are secure and that the result represents the will of the people, not those corrupting the system”.That’s not how Benson sees it. Karamo, she said, is one of several Trump-endorsed secretary of state candidates around the country who appear willing “to violate their oath, the law and the principles of our democracy in service of their party and their private agenda”.And if that happens, Benson said, “then democracy will have been dealt perhaps its greatest blow since the origins of our country”.TopicsMichiganDonald TrumpUS politicsUS elections 2020featuresReuse this content More

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      Capitol attack panel expects to hear how militia groups coordinated plans before insurrection

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      Capitol attack panel expects to hear how militia groups coordinated plans before insurrection Testimony could play a major role in establishing whether Trump oversaw a criminal conspiracy in efforts to overturn 2020 electionBehind closed doors in a nondescript conference room at the foot of Capitol Hill, the House select committee investigating 6 January next week expects to hear testimony about the connections between the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys militia groups and the Capitol attack.The panel expects to hear how the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys coordinated their plans and movements in the days before the insurrection to the same level of detail secured by the justice department and referenced in recent prosecutions for seditious conspiracy.And the select committee hopes to also hear in the 5 April deposition – arranged by a senior counsel for the panel – private conversations between the leaders of the two militia groups and whether they might have communicated with any Trump advisers.The panel should get the evidence both on the record and under oath, according to two sources familiar with the arrangement, to add to raw video footage of a meeting between the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leaders in a garage across from the Capitol on the eve of 6 January.The expected testimony and materials represent another significant breakthrough for the investigation and could play a major role in establishing for the select committee whether Donald Trump oversaw a criminal conspiracy as part of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.Most crucially for the panel, it could form part of the evidence to connect the militia groups that stormed the Capitol on 6 January to the organizers of the Save America rally that immediately preceded the attack – who in turn are slowly being linked to the Trump White House.As the select committee moves closer to Trump – who House investigators alleged in a recent court filing that the former president violated federal laws including obstructing Congress and conspiring to defraud the United States as he sought to return himself to power – it is redoubling its efforts.The information that Sean Tonolli, the senior investigative counsel who set up the deposition, should obtain about the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys in the first week of April means the panel has managed to get all the major evidence for all the big moments.In December, the select committee revealed that it had in its possession 2,320 text messages from Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, emails such as one with a PowerPoint presentation on staging a coup, and other documents he had turned over to the inquiry.That alone has been seen as a treasure trove of materials, including messages to and from House Republicans who apologized for not being able to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win, and more recently, messages with Ginni Thomas, the wife of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas.In January, the panel got from the National Archives thousands of pages of Trump White House documents that the former president unsuccessfully sought to shield over claims of executive privilege in a case that Justice Thomas reviewed and emerged as the sole dissenter.Those included documents in the files of Meadows and former deputy White House counsel Pat Philbin, among others, and Trump’s private schedule for 6 January that showed he gave the crowd a false pretense to go to the Capitol perhaps in the hope that they might stop Biden’s certification.Then the select committee learned of the fake electors ploy – a scheme to send “alternate” slates of Trump electors to Congress in states won by Biden – that ensnared the White House and showed the involvement of some of Trump’s most senior aides.Earlier this month, the panel also revealed in separate litigation that Trump lawyer John Eastman knew that his plan to have then-vice president Mike Pence reject Biden’s wins in select battleground states and return Trump to office was an unlawful violation of the Electoral Count Act.The panel has so far conducted the vast majority of its investigation in private, conducting nearly 750 depositions behind closed doors, amassing more than 84,000 documents and pursuing more than 430 tips that have come through on its website tip line.But notwithstanding the secrecy, the select committee has uncovered extraordinary information that have put them several steps closer to potentially forcing them to make criminal referrals to the justice department once the inquiry is complete, the sources said.What the panel has found and made public so far, the sources said, could also lay the groundwork to sketch out a criminal conspiracy that connects Trump’s political plan to return himself to office with the attack itself – its ultimate suspicion, the Guardian first reported.From its nondescript offices boarded up with beige boards and wood-paneled conference rooms with blinds always drawn, the select committee has spent the last eight months working in color-coded teams in an attempt to untangle Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election results.The gold team is examining Trump’s plans to stop the certification of Biden’s election win with the help of Republican members of Congress, and his pressure campaign on state, local and justice department officials to return himself to office.The red team is looking at the Save America rally organizers and the Stop the Steal Movement, while the purple team is scrutinizing the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, the 1st Amendment Praetorian and how militia groups helped lead the Trump mob into the Capitol building.As the panel moves into the second phase of its investigation, its members have said they want to release in narrative form the evidence of wrongdoing in a series of public hearings that are likely to be delayed from April to May but still focus on how Trump broke the law.The select committee’s purpose remains to recommend legislative reforms to prevent a repeat of 6 January, but the evidence collected by the panel is fast hurtling it towards a conclusion of criminal behavior that could implicate Trump – and necessitate a referral – the sources said.TopicsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpUS elections 2020US politicsThe far rightnewsReuse this content More

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      Republican won’t say whether Capitol attack panel will question Ginni Thomas

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      Republican won’t say whether Capitol attack panel will question Ginni ThomasAdam Kinzinger vows to ‘get to the bottom’ of insurrection after Clarence Thomas’s wife reportedly urged White House to overturn Trump’s election defeat Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republican members on January 6 committee, on Sunday vowed to “get to the bottom” of events surrounding the 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol but refused to reveal whether the panel intends to question Ginni Thomas – wife of US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas – over reports of her urging the White House to overturn Donald Trump’s election defeat.Senior Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar said Clarence Thomas must recuse himself from relevant cases and warned the integrity of the supreme court is at stake.Kinzinger refused to confirm or deny the existence of text messages Ginni Thomas is reported to have exchanged with then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, although he did not contest the Washington Post and CBS’s joint revelation last week that they obtained copies of such messages from materials submitted to the congressional committee by Meadows.“The question for the committee in this or any exchange is ‘was there a conspiracy, or how close did we get to overturning the election?’” he told CBS’s Face the Nation show on Sunday.Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on the House select committee investigating the events surrounding 6 January 2021, said of witnesses being summoned to give evidence to the committee: “We’ll call in whoever we need to call in.”He added: “Was there an effort to overturn the legitimate election of the United States? What was January 6 in relation to that? And what is the rot in our system that led to that and does it still exist today?…We are going to get to the bottom of this.”He did not say whether that “rot” extended to the nation’s highest court.Thomas and her husband are rightwing political darlings who have described themselves as “one being – an amalgam,” according to the New York Times.Amid the latest reports, Justice Thomas is now facing calls to recuse himself from any cases surrounding the 2020 presidential election, the insurrection and potentially the 2024 presidential election, should Trump run for re-election.Time for Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from election cases – his wife’s texts prove itRead moreMeanwhile Klobuchar of Minnesota, chairwoman of the Senate rules committee and a member of the Senate judiciary committee, which quizzes nominees for the supreme court, demanded that Clarence Thomas be removed from any such cases.“This is unbelievable,” Klobuchar told ABC’s This Week. “You have the wife of a sitting supreme court justice advocating for an insurrection, advocating for overturning a legal election, to the sitting president’s chief of staff. And she also knows this election, these cases, are going to come before her husband. This is a textbook case for removing him, recusing him, from these decisions.”The 29 exchanges reported between Ginni Thomas and Meadows reveal how the wife of one of the land’s top jurists disseminated disinformation related to the QAnon conspiracy theory and other inaccurate arguments during the tempestuous days following the November 2020 election when right-wingers were claiming Democrat Joe Biden had not won.Even as Trump strategized efforts to overturn his defeat through the courts, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas “spread false theories, commented on cable news segments and advocated with urgency and fervor that the president and his team take action to reverse the outcome of the election,” the Post reported.It reported she wrote to Meadows: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!…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.”Pressed about how he and his colleagues would broach Thomas’s alleged attempts to undermine a legitimate US election, Kinzinger said they want to ensure their work is “not driven by a political motivation, it’s driven by facts”.The House select committee has so far hesitated to demand cooperation from Thomas in part because they are worried she may “create a political spectacle to distract from the investigation”, the Guardian previously reported.Klobuchar said: “All I hear is silence from the supreme court right now. And that better change in the coming week because every other federal judge in the country except supreme court justices would have guidance from ethics rules that says you got to recuse. The entire integrity of the court is on the line here.”TopicsUS elections 2020US Capitol attackClarence ThomasUS politicsUS supreme courtLaw (US)newsReuse this content More

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      Chris Wallace: working at Fox News became ‘unsustainable’ after election

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      Chris Wallace: working at Fox News became ‘unsustainable’ after electionJournalist’s new show begins on archrival CNN’s streaming service after nearly 20 years with the right-leaning cable channel Chris Wallace has said working at Fox News became “increasingly unsustainable” before he jumped ship to CNN last December after almost 20 years with the right-leaning cable channel.His departure dealt a blow to Fox’s news operation at a time when its opinion side had become preeminent. The veteran journalist’s new show begins on archrival CNN’s streaming service this week and the 74-year-old spoke to the New York Times.‘Tucker the Untouchable’ goes soft on Putin but remains Fox News’s biggest powerRead more“I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion. But when people start to question the truth – ‘Who won the 2020 election? Was January 6 an insurrection?’ – I found that unsustainable,” he told the newspaper.He added: “Before, I found it was an environment in which I could do my job and feel good about my involvement at Fox. And since November of 2020, that just became unsustainable, increasingly unsustainable as time went on.”When asked why he didn’t leave Fox News earlier, he said: “I spent a lot of 2021 looking to see if there was a different place for me to do my job.”And he acknowledged: “Some people might have drawn the line earlier, or at a different point…I think Fox has changed over the course of the last year and a half. But I can certainly understand where somebody would say, ‘Gee, you were a slow learner, Chris’.”After Donald Trump lost the November 2020 election to Joe Biden, Fox skewed further from news to comment, ending its 7pm nightly broadcast, firing the political editor who had been part of Fox accurately projecting on election night that Trump had lost the crucial state of Arizona and promoting Tucker Carlson, the populist commentator and host who has consistently downplayed the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, by extremist Trump supporters, the New York Times noted.Carlson and other voices aired by Fox have spent the past four weeks playing down Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, going soft on Putin, and undermining the messages of the invaded country’s sovereignty and the Biden administration and Nato in supporting Ukraine.“One of the reasons that I left Fox was because I wanted to put all of that behind me,” Wallace said, adding that: “There has not been a moment when I have second-guessed myself about that decision.”Fox has won praise from the Kremlin earlier this month.TopicsFox NewsTV newsTelevision industryCNNDonald TrumpUS elections 2020US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Ginni Thomas urged Trump’s chief of staff to overturn election results

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      Ginni Thomas urged Trump’s chief of staff to overturn election resultsIn texts to Mark Meadows, the wife of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas pushed Trump’s ‘big lie’ In the weeks following the 2020 election, the conservative activist Ginni Thomas – who is married to the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas – repeatedly implored Donald Trump’s chief of staff to help overturn the results, according to text messages obtained by the Washington Post and CBS News.In one of 29 messages seen by the news outlets, Thomas wrote to Mark Meadows on 10 November: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!! … 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.”Republican says Trump asked him to ‘rescind’ 2020 election and remove Biden from officeRead moreThe messages shed light on Thomas’s direct line to the White House and how she used it to push the “big lie” that Trump had won the election – with Meadows’ apparent support, the Post reported. The exchanges are among 2,320 texts Meadows handed to the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.“This is a fight of good versus evil,” Meadows wrote in a 24 November message. “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”Meadows’ lawyer, George Terwilliger III, acknowledged the messages’ existence to the Post but said they did not raise “legal issues”.Thomas did not respond to the newspaper’s requests for comment. She has previously said that she does not discuss her activist work with her husband, and the messages do not mention him or the supreme court, according to the Post.Terwilliger and Thomas did not immediately reply to requests for comment from the Guardian. Messages left for the supreme court’s public information office were not immediately returned.When the supreme court rejected Trump challenges over the election in February 2021, Clarence Thomas dissented, calling the decision “baffling”, the Post notes.The text messages – 21 of which are from Thomas and eight from Meadows – contain references to conspiracy theories. Thomas, for instance, highlighted a claim popular among QAnon followers that the president had watermarked certain ballots as a means of identifying fraud.She also suggested the Bidens were behind supposed fraud. “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators … are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition,” she wrote.Thomas seemed to condemn some Republicans in Congress for being insufficiently loyal to Trump. “House and Senate guys are pathetic too… only 4 GOP House members seen out in street rallies with grassroots,” she wrote in a 10 November message, adding later that night: “Where the heck are all those who benefited by Presidents coattails?!!!”Other messages refer to conservative commentators and lawyers who supported Trump’s cause, including Sidney Powell, whom Thomas apparently wanted to be “the lead and the face” of Trump’s legal team. Powell was behind a slate of lawsuits seeking to overturn the election and faces investigation by the Texas State Bar Association over alleged false claims in court. Thomas expressed repeated support for Powell even as she became a divisive figure in pro-Trump circles, the Post notes. “Sidney Powell & improved coordination now will help the cavalry come and Fraud exposed and America saved,” she wrote on 13 November.“Listen to Rush. Mark Steyn, Bongino, Cleta,” Thomas urged Meadows in another message, apparently referring to the commentators Rush Limbaugh, Mark Steyn and Dan Bongino, along with Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who backed Trump’s claims in Georgia.“I will stand firm. We will fight until there is no fight left,” Meadows replied. “Our country is too precious to give up on. Thanks for all you do.”Thomas has acknowledged attending Trump’s rally prior to the Capitol attack on 6 January 2021, though she says she left before the then president spoke. She condemned the ensuing violence.TopicsUS elections 2020Clarence ThomasDonald TrumpMark MeadowsUS Capitol attackUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Republican says Trump asked him to ‘rescind’ 2020 election and remove Biden from office

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      Republican says Trump asked him to ‘rescind’ 2020 election and remove Biden from officeMo Brooks of Alabama appeared at the rally before the Capitol assault and is under scrutiny by January 6 committee The Alabama Republican congressman Mo Brooks said on Tuesday that Donald Trump asked him to “rescind” the 2020 election, remove Joe Biden from the White House and reinstate Trump.The extraordinary statement came in an angry response to a withdrawn endorsement by the former president. Trump had been angered that Brooks was insufficiently toeing his line on calling the 2020 election a fraud.Brooks’ statement on Trump’s demands is now likely to be of interest to the January 6 committee. That panel is investigating Trump’s lie about electoral fraud in his defeat by Biden, efforts to marshal members of Congress to object to election results, a rally near the White House on 6 January 2021 which Trump and Brooks addressed, and the deadly attack on the US Capitol that followed.On Wednesday, after Trump withdrew his endorsement, Brooks said he was still in the race as the only true Trumpist candidate. He also claimed to have known he risked losing the former president’s endorsement by telling him “the truth”, and added: “I repeat what has prompted President Trump’s ire.”“The only legal way America can prevent 2020’s election debacle is for patriotic Americans to focus on and win the 2022 and 2024 elections so that we have the power to enact laws that will give us honest and accurate elections.”He then added: “President Trump asked me to rescind the 2020 elections, immediately remove Joe Biden from the White House, immediately put President Trump back in the White House, and hold a new special election for the presidency.”“As a lawyer, I’ve repeatedly advised President Trump that 6 January was the final election contest verdict and neither the US constitution nor the US Code [the laws of the United States] permit what President Trump asks. Period.”Brooks also said “I took a sworn oath to defend and protect the US constitution”, an oath he said he would “break … for no man”.However, Brooks has until now been one of Trump’s most ardent supporters, including on and around the events of 6 January.Addressing the “Stop the Steal” rally at the Ellipse in Washington DC that day, Brooks said: “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.“Now, our ancestors sacrificed their blood, their sweat, their tears, their fortunes and sometimes their lives … Are you willing to do the same? My answer is yes. Louder! Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America?”Trump told supporters to “fight like hell” to stop the certification of election results. According to a bipartisan Senate report, seven deaths were linked to the riot that followed. Nearly 800 people have been charged, some with seditious conspiracy. Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection but acquitted when enough Republican senators stayed loyal.In the aftermath of the riot, Brooks was the first of 147 Republican members of Congress to vote against certifying election results.His role in the “Stop the Steal” movement has been under scrutiny ever since.Multiple reporters have placed Brooks with other far-right Republicans including Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Jim Jordan of Ohio in White House meetings with Trump. An organiser of the 6 January rally, the convicted felon Ally Alexander, has named Brooks and two Arizona Republicans, Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs, as members of Congress who helped plan the event.Brooks said he spoke at the invitation of the Trump White House and had no recollection of communicating with Alexander. He has also confirmed that he wore body armour while giving his speech.The January 6 committee has been weighing whether to seek to compel Brooks to testify.A Democratic congressman, Eric Swalwell of California, sued Brooks, Trump, Donald Trump Jr and Rudy Giuliani for violating federal civil rights law and local incitement law. In February, a federal judge said he would dismiss Brooks, Giuliani and Trump Jr from the case, because their speeches were political and thus protected by the first amendment.Brooks is running for US Senate in Alabama, his campaign featuring warnings of “dictatorial socialism and its threat to liberty, freedom and the very fabric of American society”.He had attracted Trump’s endorsement. But in a statement on Wednesday, Trump said: “Mo Brooks of Alabama made a horrible mistake recently when he went ‘woke’ and stated, referring to the 2020 Presidential Election Scam, ‘Put that behind you, put that behind you.’“When I heard this statement, I said, ‘Mo, you just blew the election, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’”In response, Brooks accused Trump of being “manipulated” by Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate.McConnell and Trump have split since 6 January, after which McConnell voted to acquit Trump at trial but also excoriated him in a speech on the Senate floor.The Republican establishment reportedly fears that extreme pro-Trump candidates could jeopardise the party’s chances of retaking the Senate this year. A model for such a catastrophe exists in Alabama, where in 2017 an extremist, Roy Moore, was beaten by the Democrat Doug Jones in a special election.Brooks has however fallen behind in polling and fundraising. Katie Britt, a former aide to the retiring senator, Richard Shelby, is well placed to secure the nomination.TopicsUS elections 2020Donald TrumpUS Capitol attackRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Trump White House aide was secret author of report used to push ‘big lie’

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      Trump White House aide was secret author of report used to push ‘big lie’Report on Dominion voting machines produced after 2020 election was not the work of volunteer in Trump’s post-election legal team Weeks after the 2020 election, at least one Trump White House aide was named as secretly producing a report that alleged Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden because of Dominion Voting Systems – research that formed the basis of the former president’s wider efforts to overturn the election.The Dominion report, subtitled “OVERVIEW 12/2/20 – History, Executives, Vote Manipulation Ability and Design, Foreign Ties”, was initially prepared so that it could be sent to legislatures in states where the Trump White House was trying to have Biden’s win reversed.Trump lawyer knew plan to delay Biden certification was unlawful, emails showRead moreBut top Trump officials would also use the research that stemmed from the White House aide-produced report to weigh other options to return Trump to the presidency, including having the former president sign off on executive orders to authorize sweeping emergency powers.The previously unreported involvement of the Trump White House aide in the preparation of the Dominion report raises the extraordinary situation of at least one administration official being among the original sources of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The publicly available version of the Dominion report, which first surfaced in early December 2020 on the conservative outlet the Gateway Pundit, names on the cover and in metadata as its author Katherine Friess, a volunteer on the Trump post-election legal team.But the Dominion report was in fact produced by the senior Trump White House policy aide Joanna Miller, according to the original version of the document reviewed by the Guardian and a source familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.The original version of the Dominion report named Miller – who worked for the senior Trump adviser Peter Navarro – as the author on the cover page, until her name was abruptly replaced with that of Friess before the document was to be released publicly, the source said.The involvement of a number of other Trump White House aides who worked in Navarro’s office was also scrubbed around that time, the source said. Friess has told the Daily Beast that she had nothing to do with the report and did not know how her name came to be on the document.It was not clear why Miller’s name was removed from the report, which was sent to Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani on 29 November 2020, or why the White House aide’s involvement was obfuscated in the final 2 December version. Miller did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The Dominion report made a number of unsubstantiated allegations that claimed Dominion Voting Systems corruptly ensured there could be “technology glitches which resulted in thousands of votes being added to Joe Biden’s total ballot count”.Citing unnamed Venezuelan officials, the report also pushed the conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems used software from the election company Smartmatic and had ties to “state-run Venezuelan software and telecommunications companies”.After the Dominion report became public, Navarro incorporated the claims into his own three-part report, produced with assistance from his aides at the White House, including Miller and another policy aide, Garrett Ziegler, the source said.Ziegler has also said on a rightwing podcast that he and others in Navarro’s office – seemingly referring to Trump White House aides Christopher Abbott and Hannah Robertson – started working on Navarro’s report about two weeks before the 2020 election took place.“Two weeks before the election, we were doing those reports hoping that we would pepper the swing states with those,” Ziegler said of the three-part Navarro report in an appearance last July on The Professor’s Record with David K Clements.The research in the Dominion report also formed the backbone of foreign election interference claims by the former Trump lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who argued Trump could, as a result, assume emergency presidential powers and suspend normal law.That included Trump’s executive order 13848, which authorized sweeping powers in the event of foreign election interference, as well as a draft executive order that would have authorized the seizure of voting machines, the Guardian has previously reported.The claims about Venezuela in the Dominion report appear to have spurred Powell to ask Trump at a 18 December 2020 meeting at the White House – coincidentally facilitated by Ziegler – that she be appointed special counsel to investigate election fraud.Miller’s authorship of the Dominion report was not the last time the Trump White House, or individuals in the administration, prepared materials to advance the former president’s claims about a stolen election and efforts to return himself to office.The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack revealed last year it had found evidence the White House Communications Agency produced a letter for the Trump justice department official Jeffrey Clark to use to pressure states to decertify Biden’s election win.TopicsUS elections 2020Trump administrationUS Capitol attacknewsReuse this content More