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      William Barr: Trump is full of bull – but I’ll vote for him

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      William Barr: Trump is full of bull – but I’ll vote for himBarr’s book reveals he told Trump he was ‘like a bull in a bull ring’ – in return, Trump calls his former attorney general a ‘horse’ Donald Trump’s second attorney general, William Barr, told the former US president he was “like a bull in a bull ring” and “someone’s going to come and put a sword through your head”.Trump: US should put Chinese flags on F-22 jets and ‘bomb shit out of’ RussiaRead moreIn return, Trump called Barr a “horse” who had been “broken” by the radical left.Such was the state of debate in the upper echelons of the Republican party on Monday as it digested the latest round of promotion of Barr’s memoir, One Damn Thing After Another.The book will be published on Tuesday but it has been extensively trailed – including by the Guardian. On the page and in interviews, Barr says Trump is unfit for the presidency and should not be the Republican nominee in 2024.But Barr remains a staunch conservative. On Monday, he told NBC’s Today that despite it all, if Trump was the Republican nominee in 2024, he would vote for him.“Because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic party, it’s inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t vote for the Republican nominee,” Barr said.In his book, Barr repeatedly describes disagreements with Trump and tactics used by senior aides including the then secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to distract or obstruct the erratic and often furious president.Speaking to NPR on Monday, Barr repeated a passage in his book when he said: “At one point, I said to [Trump]: ‘You know, Mr President, you’re like a bull in a bull ring and your adversaries have your number. They know how to get under your skin, and all they have to do is wave a red flag over here and you go charging and attack it.’“And I said, ‘At the end of the day, you’re going to be in the middle of the ring sweating and someone’s going to come and put a sword through your head.“He didn’t think much of that metaphor.”Trump evidently no longer thinks much of Barr. This weekend, the former president wrote a lengthy letter to Lester Holt, an NBC anchor who interviewed Barr on TV.“Bill Barr cares more about the corrupt Washington media and elite than serving the American people,” Trump wrote, as reported by Axios.“He was slow, lethargic, and I realised early on that he never had what it takes to make a great attorney general. When the radical left Democrats threatened to hold him in contempt and even worse, impeach him, he became virtually worthless for law and order and election integrity. They broke him just like a trainer breaks a horse.”Trump also said: “I would imagine that if the book is anything like him, it will be long, slow and very boring.”Critics might disagree. Reviewing the book for the Washington Post, Devlin Barrett said Trump’s second attorney general “was easily [his] most effective and important cabinet member” and Barr’s memoir showed he could “tell a good yarn and has a penchant for deadpan punchlines”.That said, Barrett wrote, Barr had really written “a defense of his tenure to fellow conservatives”.“Barr bided his time before taking one last swing,” Barrett said. “But as long as there are senior officials like Barr, there will be presidents like Trump.”The book has produced a flood of media attention, including charges that Barr is seeking to whitewash his role in some of Trump’s most controversial moments.Barr defends his handling of the investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow. In particular, he focuses on his decision to release a summary of the report by Robert Mueller. In that letter, Barr cleared Trump of seeking to obstruct justice despite the special counsel laying out 10 possible instances of such potentially criminal behavior.Speaking to NBC, Barr repeated his conclusion that Trump’s claims of voter fraud in his defeat by Joe Biden were baseless – he has used the word “bullshit” – while skating over criticism for using the Department of Justice to investigate such lies.He said Trump was “responsible in the broad sense of that word” for the deadly Capitol riot over which he was impeached a second time, for inciting an insurrection.William Barr’s Trump book: self-serving narratives and tricky truths ignoredRead more“It appears that part of the plan was to send this group up to the Hill,” Barr said, of the storming of Congress by Trump supporters around which seven people died. “I think the whole idea was to intimidate Congress. And I think that that was wrong.”But he also said: “I haven’t seen anything to say he was legally responsible for it in terms of incitement.”Barr also addressed an incident he left out of his book: the firing of a US attorney, Geoffrey Berman, who was supervising investigations of Trump associates and business affairs as well as an investigation of a Turkish bank which the Turkish president asked Trump to drop.“I didn’t think there was any threat to the president,” Barr told NBC, adding that the decision “was my call”.“I hadn’t really thought much of him,” he said. “I wanted to make the change.”TopicsWilliam BarrDonald TrumpUS politicsUS elections 2020US elections 2024US Capitol attackPolitics booksnewsReuse this content More

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      Trump ignores Farage – and risks midterm elections farrago – with insistence on big lie

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      Trump ignores Farage – and risks midterm elections farrago – with insistence on big lie Analysis: His British friend tried to help but the former president did not want to forget his voter fraud obsession and focus on the future. CPAC loved it but Republicans hoping to take Congress know they are courting disasterThe sagest advice given to Donald Trump all week came from a man who is neither a Republican nor an American.Donald Trump defends calling Putin ‘smart’, hints at 2024 presidential bidRead moreNigel Farage, the British politician, broadcaster and demagogue whose Brexit campaign coincided with Trump’s rise to power, warned his old pal against endlessly fixating on the 2020 election.“This message of a stolen election, if you think about it, is actually a negative backward looking message,” Farage told the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida.“There is a better, more positive message the Republican party needs to embrace and it’s this: ‘We are going state by state, vote by vote to make sure that America has the best, the cleanest, the fairest election system anywhere in the western world.’”Urging an end to the “big lie” obsession is heresy at places like CPAC, the Woodstock of the red meat right. Perhaps no pro-Trump Republican would dare breathe it to the former president, lest he slap them with a demeaning nickname, endorse a primary opponent or blackball them from his luxury Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.But Farage, as foreigner and fellow traveller, may have felt liberated to speak an inconvenient truth: that endlessly re-litigating the last election with false claims of voter fraud could prove a serious liability for Republicans in November’s midterms.The former UK Independence party and Brexit party leader went on: “That negative anger must be turned into a positive. You’ve got to offer the voters of this country a shining city on the hill. You’ve got to give them a vision. People want dreams, people want hopes, and the deliverers of that message are you guys.”The audience sounded receptive enough. And while some CPAC speakers did promulgate “the big lie” – Ohio Senate hopeful Josh Mandel declared, “I want to say it very clearly and very directly: I believe this election was stolen from Donald J Trump” – they generally gave greater emphasis to winning Congress in 2022 and, of course, Trump returning to the White House in 2024.Jim Jordan, an Ohio congressman and close Trump ally, declared: “I believe President Trump is going to run again … I think if he runs, he’s going to win.”But the annual CPAC straw poll testing who should get the Republican nomination raised more questions than answers. Of course Trump won with more votes than everyone else combined. But his 59% was not quite the overwhelming show of force he might have hoped for in what is usually the capital of Trumpistan.There is now a clear alternative. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, finished second on 28%, well clear of Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, on 2%.In a separate poll where Trump was removed from the equation, DeSantis won by a landslide 61%.On the other hand, Florida is DeSantis’s home state, so he might expect to punch above his weight here. The governor gave a well received speech on Thursday that notably failed to mention Trump. But the audience for Trump’s address on Saturday was appreciably bigger and brimming with “Trump 2024” badges and caps.Even those sporting DeSantis regalia were not quite ready to back him. David Duffy, 57, a retired insurance worker sporting a giant “DeSantisLand” flag, said: “We want to keep President Trump as our president. We believe he still is our president and, with DeSantis being 42 years old, we want to give him a little bit more time.”Asked for her 2024 preference, Marnie Allen, wearing a “DeSantisLand” cap, said: “Trump, only because I owe him. I think we all owe him to make up for the disasters and because he’s going to go in with a vengeance this time and take care of our fourth level of government: career bureaucrats. He will go in this time and he will take a machete to them.”The 51-year-old from Orlando, who works in higher education, felt compelled to add: “Not a real machete, of course, but a figurative machete.”Unless something dramatic happens – a criminal indictment in New York, say – the nomination remains Trump’s to lose. On Saturday he dropped his strongest hint yet that he does intend to pursue it.The strange Republican world where the big lie lives on and Trump is fighting to save democracyRead moreHe clearly did not get Farage’s memo. Trump told the audience: “The Rinos [Republicans In Name Only] and certain weak Republican politicians want to ignore election integrity also but we cannot ignore it. We have to fix it. Make no mistake, they [Democrats] will try to do it again in ’22 and ’24, and we cannot let them do that.“And the way we [let them do that] is to come to a very powerful conclusion as to what happened in 2020. We stand down to stop talking about it, we stop making Americans aware of the cheating and corruption that went on. That’s really saying, ‘It’s OK, you can do it again.’ We can’t let that happen.”The slapping sound you heard was a hundred Republican midterm candidates planting their hands on their foreheads. Trump is coming to a district near you, with a big lie to tell. It remains Democrats’ best hope of a midterm miracle.TopicsDonald TrumpCPACUS politicsRepublicansUS midterm elections 2022US elections 2024Ron DeSantisanalysisReuse this content More

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      Republicans fear Michelle Obama presidential run, ex-Trump aide says

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      Republicans fear Michelle Obama presidential run, ex-Trump aide saysFormer treasury spokeswoman tells CPAC ex-first lady is popular and ‘immune to criticism’ – though Obama has ruled out politics

      Trump hints at 2024 presidential bid in CPAC speech
      Michelle Obama would put Republicans “in a very difficult position” if she ran for president in 2024, a former Trump aide said, because the former first lady is both popular and “immune to criticism”.The strange Republican world where the big lie lives on and Trump is fighting to save democracyRead moreMonica Crowley, a former treasury spokeswoman, was speaking on Saturday at CPAC, the conservative conference in Orlando, Florida, at which Donald Trump strongly suggested he will run again in two years’ time.“If [Democrats] were to run Michelle Obama,” Crowley said, during a panel session, “that would put us in a very difficult position because they’d reach for a candidate who is completely plausible, very popular, and immune to criticism.“Also, when you think about her positioning, she [was a Democratic convention] keynote speaker in 2020, she wrote her autobiography [Becoming, a bestseller] and did a 50-city tour, she has massive Netflix and Spotify deals, and she’s got a voting rights group alongside [the Georgia politician and campaigner] Stacey Abrams.”Crowley, a sometime Fox News contributor, is well-connected in Trumpworld. In 2016, Trump sought to appoint her as a deputy national security adviser. She withdrew, amid allegations of plagiarism in a book about the Obama administration and in her PhD dissertation.Crowley called the allegations a “straight-up political hit job” but the book was withdrawn and updated. Columbia University concluded that Crowley’s PhD contained “localised instances of plagiarism” which did not constitute research misconduct. She became treasury spokeswoman in 2019 and, according to the New York Times, was “seen as a positive presence”.Obama is beloved among Democrats and polls highly in surveys of notional fields should Joe Biden go against all indications and decide not to run for a second term, and should Kamala Harris, the vice-president, not then secure the nomination. The former first lady has spoken up on key Democratic policies, including the need to protect voting rights.A candidacy is feared by Republicans all the way up to Trump, who according to the Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender was convinced Democrats would parachute Obama in to replace Biden at the 2020 convention.But she has repeatedly said she has no wish to enter politics as a candidate.In 2018, she told a conference in Boston: “The reason why I don’t want to run for president … is that, first of all, you have to want the job.“And you can’t just say, ‘Well, you’re a woman, run.’ We just can’t find the women we like and ask them to do it, because there are millions of women who are inclined and do have the passion for politics.“I’ve never had the passion for politics. I just happened to be married to somebody who has the passion for politics, and he drug me kicking and screaming into the arena.”Obama has also said she would like to retire – or spend more time “chasing summer”.Her husband has said: “Michelle will not run for president. I can guarantee it.”Still, some Republicans still appear to fear Obama could somehow be dragged into a race against Trump.Crowley said: “For all of these people who say, ‘Michelle Obama isn’t political … they’re making too much money now,’ keep a very close eye on her because her trajectory is exactly what Barack Obama did before he ran for president and what Bill and Hillary Clinton both did.01:07“I think if she were to run, that would be a very difficult situation for us.”Calls to expel Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene after speech at white nationalist event Read moreCrowley also said she thought Democrats would need to appeal to Black women, particularly if Harris could not secure a post-Biden nomination.Contrary to Crowley’s claim, Michelle Obama’s “trajectory” does not seem similar to that of her husband or either Clinton. A successful lawyer and popular first lady, she has never run for national office, let alone been a senator (Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton), governor (Bill Clinton) or secretary of state (Hillary Clinton again).She has however given well-received speeches at Democratic conventions – including a heartfelt expression of support for Biden, her husband’s vice-president, and criticism of Trump, in 2020.“Let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can,” she said then. “Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country.“He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.”TopicsMichelle ObamaUS elections 2024US politicsDemocratsRepublicansDonald TrumpJoe BidennewsReuse this content More

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      Tim Scott, only Black Senate Republican, hints he could be Trump running mate

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      Tim Scott, only Black Senate Republican, hints he could be Trump running mateSouth Carolinian tells Fox News ‘Everybody wants to be on President Trump’s bandwagon, without any question’

      Opposition to Trump stirs among Republicans
      The only Black Republican in the Senate, Tim Scott of South Carolina, has indicated a willingness to be Donald Trump’s running mate should the former president mount another White House campaign.Florida governor: school districts that defied no-mask mandate to lose $200m Read moreAsked by Fox News if he would consider joining a Trump ticket in 2024, Scott said: “Everybody wants to be on President Trump’s bandwagon, without any question.”The remark prompted criticism, in light of Trump’s long history of incendiary rhetoric on race.Mehdi Hasan, an MSNBC host, listed some examples when he wrote: “Shithole countries, go back to where you came from, very fine people, white people don’t get vaccines, stand back and stand by … none of it matters to Tim Scott.”Scott, 56, is widely seen as a contender for the Republican nomination itself, though most observers think it remains Trump’s for the taking.The former president is free to run after Republicans, including Scott, voted to acquit in his second impeachment trial, for inciting the deadly Capitol attack.Tensions between the party establishment and Trump supporters have increased, particularly after the Republican National Committee called Trump’s lie about election fraud and the attack on Congress it fueled “legitimate political discourse”.On Sunday, Scott told Fox News: “One of the things that I said to the president is he gets to decide the future of our party and our country because he is still the loudest voice.”On Saturday, the Washington Post ranked its top 10 contenders for the Republican nomination. Trump was first, Scott sixth.Pointing to the South Carolinian’s aggressive fundraising, the paper said Scott was “raising huge money – $7m last quarter – for something which should, by all accounts, be a pretty sleepy re-election race. He’s also doing something lots of presidential candidates do before running: release a book.”Cruz: Biden promise to put Black woman on supreme court is racial discriminationRead moreThe paper made the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, second-favourite. The former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador Nikki Haley was third, former vice-president Mike Pence fourth and Donald Trump Jr fifth.Senator Ted Cruz of Texas was seventh, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin eighth, New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu ninth and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo 10th.Scott said: “What I hope happens is that we rally around the principles that lead to our greatest success. I am not looking for a seat on a ticket at this point. I am however looking to be re-elected in South Carolina.“So my hope is that you win next Friday’s football game before thinking about any other one. So that’s my primary responsibility.”TopicsUS elections 2024Donald TrumpRepublicansUS politicsRaceSouth CarolinanewsReuse this content More

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      ‘We have a project’: QAnon followers eye swing state election official races

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      ‘We have a project’: QAnon followers eye swing state election official racesAs part of a calculated assault on democracy, QAnon steered far-right candidates toward secretary of state contests QAnon, the extremist conspiracy movement whose followers believe Donald Trump is waging war against the “deep state”, appears to have instigated a nationwide effort to take control of the US election process in critical battleground states ahead of America’s 2024 presidential election.QAnon and on: why the fight against extremist conspiracies is far from overRead moreIn recent months concern has risen over the coordinated efforts of at least 15 candidates – committed to Trump’s “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from him – who are now running to serve as chief election officials in key swing states.At least eight of the candidates standing for secretary of state positions have formed an alliance in which they share tactics and tips for success, details of which the Guardian revealed last month.Should any of the candidates be elected, they would be in prime position to distort or even overturn election results in favor of Trump or another preferred presidential candidate in ways that could have a profound impact on or even determine the national outcome.All the big lie candidates vying to gain control of election counts at state level present themselves as Republicans. It is now emerging that QAnon played a critical role in steering far-right candidates towards the secretary of state races as part of what appears to be a calculated nationwide assault on American democracy.“This is the way that QAnon could trigger a constitutional crisis,” said Alex Kaplan, senior researcher at the watchdog Media Matters for America who is a close observer of the conspiracy theory. “QAnon is linked to an effort to recruit and elect candidates to positions directly controlling election administrations, and given their ties to harming democracy, that is very concerning.”QAnon emerged in 2017 when an unknown figure, “Q”, began to post on the 4chan message board that Trump, then in the White House, was secretly preparing to destroy a cabal of Satan-worshipping child traffickers. The conspiracy has become more overtly political in recent months, helping to spread baseless claims that the 2020 election was rigged for Joe Biden.It was also implicated in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. The FBI has arrested more than 20 QAnon followers for violent acts on that day. Last June the agency released a threat assessment that warned that other adherents of the conspiracy could begin “accepting the legitimacy of violent action”.The links between QAnon and the coordinated push to control election counts was revealed by one of the big lie candidates himself. Jim Marchant, a former Republican lawmaker who is running to become chief election official in Nevada, disclosed the connection at “Patriot Double Down”, a QAnon-linked convention held in Las Vegas in October.Marchant told the convention that the idea that he should run for secretary of state was not his own. It was given to him by a prominent QAnon-influencer who goes by the alias Juan O Savin.The name is a phonetic play on the number 1-0-7. Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet.Marchant told the audience of QAnon advocates that he was approached by Savin the day after the presidential election on 3 November. Savin came to him in a suite he had rented in the Las Vegas Venetian hotel accompanied by “other President Trump allies” and told him that instead of running for Congress, which he was considering, Marchant should stand for the post of top election administrator in Nevada.“I said, ‘Absolutely’,” Marchant said in a recorded video of his speech to the convention.“I knew right then that they had figured out that we need to take back the secretary of state offices around the country. Not only did they ask me to run, they asked me to put together a coalition of other like-minded secretary of state candidates. I got to work, Juan O Savin helped, and we formed a coalition.”In an interview with the Guardian last month, Marchant confirmed that he had set up an alliance of at least eight far-right secretary of state candidates in states that are likely to determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. They include Arizona, Georgia and Michigan – states which were critical in the 2020 presidential election and which all now have big lie candidates running for secretary of state posts who have been endorsed by Trump.The Guardian contacted Marchant about the QAnon connection, but he did not respond.Marchant’s disclosure of the formative role played by Juan O Savin in the secretary of state candidates alliance, which was first reported by the Daily Beast and by Kaplan for Media Matters, has in turn been corroborated by Savin himself. Kaplan has monitored several recent instances where the QAnon-influencer has spoken about having backed the alliance.In January he told a QAnon show that “we have a project that we are doing helping candidates across the country that we started here in Nevada that has prospered pretty well, with a number of Trump endorsements”.In May he said in a video conversation that he had recently organized a meeting of about 50 people to look at “how we are going to get to a lawful election this time around and get to the right result. How we are going to coordinate between the different states to get to the right outcome.”In the most recent comment, on Sunday, he talked about “the secretary of state stuff”, boasting that “across the country we are gaining strength rapidly to get back into this game in an effective way. A lot of those offices that they thought they held and weren’t going to matter, we are going to flip those.”QAnon watchers say that Savin has been rising rapidly within the conspiracy theory in recent months. “He used to be a fringe figure, but has become a lot more prominent,” said Al Jones, founder of the Q Origins Project, a group of analysts who track the QAnon movement.Savin made a rare open public appearance at the Patriot Double Down convention. Normally, though, he hides his identity. He is often interviewed by QAnon followers as he is driving, showing only his hands on the steering wheel or his cowboy boots.He brags about having high-up contacts in the US intelligence services, though in fact he is believed to be a private insurance investigator living in the Seattle area. He claims to be friends with the actor Roseanne Barr, and in one of the wilder aspects of his influence, is believed by many QAnon followers to be John F Kennedy Jr.Savin’s recent efforts have been focused on spreading falsehoods about mass fraud in the 2020 election. He has also amplified apocalyptic conspiracy theories including that President Biden’s public appearances are broadcast with the use of a green screen to disguise his disabilities.Travis View, a leading QAnon watcher and host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, told the Guardian that it would be “ruinous for democracy if people involved with QAnon got into positions of power where they have actual influence in determining the results or legitimacy of elections. QAnon is such an anti-reality way of thinking that it is entirely incompatible with the conventions that sustain democracy.”Several people close to Trump are known to have deep ties with the QAnon movement. Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser to Trump, spoke at a previous QAnon conference in Dallas and is thought to also have pushed a strategy of standing for local election among QAnon followers.Sidney Powell, who advocated for overturning the 2020 election result and who Trump at one point verbally agreed to appoint as special counsel on election fraud, also has ties to QAnon. Before Trump was removed from Twitter, he frequently disseminated comments from QAnon followers.TopicsQAnonUS politicsUS elections 2024featuresReuse this content More

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      Quiet part loud: Trump says Pence ‘could have overturned the election’

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      Quiet part loud: Trump says Pence ‘could have overturned the election’In statement protesting against reform of Electoral Count Act, ex-president appears to admit Joe Biden won Donald Trump was accused of “saying the quiet part loud” on Sunday night, when he protested that Mike Pence, his former vice-president, could have overturned his election defeat by Joe Biden.Trump tours the country in support of candidates pushing the ‘big lie’Read moreThough he has appeared to admit Biden won before, Trump usually insists he won and his opponent stole the election through voter fraud – the “big lie” which animates rallies like one in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday.On Sunday Trump attempted to seize on moves by a bipartisan group of senators to reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which Trump tried to use to have Pence refuse to certify Biden’s victory.Pence concluded he did not have the authority to do so. On the same day, 6 January 2021, supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” attacked the US Capitol.Seven people died and more than 100 police officers were hurt. More than 700 people have been charged, 11 with seditious conspiracy. Trump and his aides are the target of congressional investigation.But Trump survived impeachment when enough Senate Republicans stayed loyal and is free to run for office.On Saturday, he promised pardons for 6 January rioters if re-elected and exhorted followers to protest against investigations of his business and political affairs in New York and Georgia.In a statement on Sunday, Trump claimed “fraud and many other irregularities” in the 2020 election – no large-scale fraud has been found – and asked: “How come the Democrats and … Republicans, like Wacky Susan Collins, are desperately trying to pass legislation that will not allow the vice-president to change the results of the election?“Actually, what they are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power. He could have overturned the election!”Collins, of Maine, was one of seven Republicans to vote to convict Trump over the Capitol attack. Such is his grip on her party, on Sunday she would not say she would not support him if he ran again. But she did tell ABC why she wanted to reform the Electoral Count Act.“We saw, on 6 January 2021, how ambiguities, simple law, were exploited. We need to prevent that from happening again. I’m hopeful that we can come up with a bipartisan bill that will make very clear that the vice-president’s role is simply ministerial, that he has no ability to halt the count.”Dick Durbin of Illinois, a member of Democratic Senate leadership, said reform to the electoral college process was merited because Trump gambits including false slates of electors “really raise a question about the integrity of that process. It hasn’t been looked at for 150 years. Now’s the time.”Pundits seized on Trump’s latest apparent blunder into the truth.Trump pardon promise for Capitol rioters ‘stuff of dictators’ – Nixon aideRead moreBill Kristol, a conservative writer, said: “Talk about saying the quiet part loud. Trump here admits or rather boasts [about] what he wanted Mike Pence to do.”Chris Krebs, fired as head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under Trump but who pronounced the 2020 election “the most secure in US history”, said: “In the last 24 hours the former president: (1) floated pardons for [January 6] defendants, (2) encouraged civil unrest if he’s indicted in [Georgia or New York], (3) once again confirmed he pressured Pence to overturn a lawful election.“He’s radicalizing his base to be his personal Brown Shirts.”Olivia Troye, a former Pence aide, wrote: “Every Republican candidate and official should go on record with their answer: Do you support sedition and pardoning domestic terrorists?”TopicsDonald TrumpUS elections 2020US elections 2024US politicsRepublicansUS CongressUS SenatenewsReuse this content More

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      Trump pardon promise for Capitol rioters ‘stuff of dictators’ – Nixon aide

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      Trump pardon promise for Capitol rioters ‘stuff of dictators’ – Nixon aideTrump makes promise at rally in Texas on SaturdayJohn Dean: ‘Failure to confront tyrant encourages bad behavior’ Donald Trump’s promise to pardon supporters who attacked the US Capitol on January 6 2021 was “the stuff of dictators”, Richard Nixon’s White House counsel warned.Trump tours the country endorsing candidates to reinforce the ‘big lie’Read moreTrump made the promise at a rally in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday.“If I run and if I win,” he said, referring to the 2024 presidential election, “we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”More than 700 people have been charged in connection with the Capitol attack, around which seven people died as Trump supporters tried to stop certification of his election defeat, in service of his lie that it was caused by electoral fraud. More than 100 police officers were hurt.Eleven members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia have been charged with seditious conspiracy. Trump himself was impeached for inciting the riot. Ten House Republicans voted to impeach but Trump was acquitted when only seven Republican senators found him guilty. That left him free to run for office again.John Dean, 83, was White House counsel from 1970 to 1973 before being disbarred and detained as a result of the Watergate scandal, which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Dean responded to Trump on Twitter.“This is beyond being a demagogue to the stuff of dictators,” he wrote. “He is defying the rule of law. Failure to confront a tyrant only encourages bad behaviour. If thinking Americans don’t understand what Trump is doing and what the criminal justice system must do we are all in big trouble!”Trump was generous with pardons in office, recipients including Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn, both now targets of the House committee investigating January 6 and with Trump in its sights. On Sunday morning, the New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu, widely seen as a relative moderate in Trump’s Republican party, was asked if pardons should be offered to Capitol rioters.“Of course not,” he told CNN’s State of the Union. “Oh, my goodness. No.”Even Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator and dogged Trump ally, said the former president was wrong.“I don’t want to send any signals that it was OK to defile the Capitol,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation. “I want to deter what people did on January 6, and those who did it, I hope they go to jail and get the book thrown at them because they deserve it.”But a moderate Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, indicated the hold Trump has on the party. Appearing on ABC’s This Week, the senator said Trump should not “have made that pledge to do pardons. We should let the judicial process proceed.”But Collins, who voted to convict Trump over the Capitol attack, would not say that she would not support him if he ran for president again.“Well certainly it’s not likely given the many other qualified candidates that we have, that have expressed interest in running,” she said. “So it’s very unlikely.”Trump dominates polling concerning potential Republican nominees for 2024.Others deplored Trump’s words in Texas. Richard Painter, a White House ethics counsel under George W Bush, said the promise of pardons should, constitutionally speaking, stop Trump running again.“This alone is giving aid or comfort to an insurrection within the meaning of the 14th amendment, section three,” Painter wrote. “Trump is DISQUALIFIED from public office.”Trump also complained about investigations of his business and political affairs which have landed him legal jeopardy. On Sunday, Graham, whose actions in support of Trump are being investigated in Georgia, said he would cooperate if asked.“Yeah,” he said. “Give me a call.”But he also complained about a supposed “effort here to use the law, I think inappropriately. So I don’t know what they’re going to do in Fulton county [Georgia]. I don’t know what the January 6 committee is going to do. I expect those who defile the Capitol to be prosecuted. But there’s a political movement using the law to try to knock Trump out of running. And I, particularly, don’t like it or appreciate it.”Lindsey Graham, reverse ferret: how John McCain’s spaniel became Trump’s poodleRead moreIn Texas, Trump urged supporters to protest.“If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal,” he said, “I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington DC, in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere, because our country and our elections are corrupt.”Prosecutors, he said, were “trying to put me in jail. These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They’re racists and they’re very sick. They’re mentally sick. They’re going after me without any protection of my rights by the supreme court or most other courts.”Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor now a legal analyst for NBC, said: “Trump is not only encouraging his supporters to violence if he’s arrest[ed], he’s also signaling that he’ll pardon them, just as he’ll pardon the [January 6] insurrectionists.“Will this finally move prosecutors to hold him accountable for his crimes?”TopicsDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS elections 2024TexasnewsReuse this content More

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      Sanders: ‘anti-democratic’ Republicans to blame for Biden woes, not just Manchin and Sinema

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      Sanders: ‘anti-democratic’ Republicans to blame for Biden woes, not just Manchin and SinemaSenator confirms he will campaign against moderate Democrats if they face primary challenges

      Robert Reich: Manchin and Sinema are all about their egos
      Bernie Sanders on Sunday sought to turn fire aimed by Democrats at two of their own, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, onto Republican senators he said were “pushing an anti-democratic agenda”.Kyrsten Sinema: Arizona Democrats censure senator for voting rights failureRead more“Republicans are laughing all the way to election day,” the Vermont senator told CNN’s State of the Union. “They have not had to cast one bloody vote which shows us where they’re at.”But the Vermont progressive also confirmed that he will campaign against Manchin and Sinema, both Democrats, should they face viable primary challengers.Manchin, from West Virginia, and Sinema, from Arizona, have blocked Democratic priorities including the Build Back Better spending plan and, this week, voting rights reform.Their refusal to contemplate reform to the filibuster, the rule which requires 60-vote majorities for most legislation, meant two voting rights bills in answer to Republican attacks on voting in states were always doomed to fail.On Saturday, Sinema was formally censured by her state party. Sanders said he supported that move. He also confirmed his threat to campaign against Sinema and Manchin in 2024.“If there was strong candidates prepared to stand up for working families who understand that the Democratic party has got to be the party of working people, taking on big money interests, if both candidates were there in Arizona and West Virginia, yes, I would be happy to support them.”But, Sanders insisted, “it’s not only those two. It is 50 Republicans who have been adamant about not only pushing an anti-democratic agenda but also opposing our efforts to try to lower the cost of prescription drugs, trying to expand Medicare … to improve the disaster situation in home healthcare, in childcare, to address the existential threat of climate change. “You’ve got 50 Republicans who don’t want to do anything except criticise the president and then you have, sadly enough, two Democrats who choose to work with Republicans rather than the president, and it will sabotage the president’s effort to address the needs of working families in this country.”Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press, Sanders insisted the Biden administration made “a great start”, in part with a Covid relief bill passed with just 50 votes and the casting vote of Vice-President Kamala Harris, but was now bogged down thanks in large part to Manchin and Sinema.“The president and the Democratic Congress,” Sanders said, “… looked at the economic crisis that was caused by Covid. We passed the American Rescue Plan … and we also passed along the way the strongest infrastructure bill that has been passed since Dwight D Eisenhower … We were off to a great start. “And then I will tell you exactly what happened. Fifty members of the Republican party decided that they were going to be obstructionist … and then you had two United States senators joining them, Mr Manchin and Senator Sinema. “For five months now there have been negotiations behind closed doors trying to get these two Democratic senators on board. That strategy, in my view, has failed. It has failed dismally. We saw it last week in terms of the Voting Rights Act. We now need a new direction.”Asked if he was frustrated, Sanders told CNN he was.But, he insisted, “we need to start voting. We need to bring important pieces of legislation that impact the lives of working families right onto the floor of the Senate. And Republicans want to vote against lowering the cost of climate change, home healthcare, whatever it may be. And if the Democrats want to join them, let the American people see what’s happening. “Then we can pick up the pieces and pass legislation.”Abolishing the filibuster won’t lead to a ‘tyranny of the majority’. It’s quite the opposite Read moreSome Democrats advocate splitting Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan into separate bills, in order to pass what they can.Sanders conceded that most such legislation will not pass, given Republican obstruction and the machinations of Manchin and Sinema. Bringing bills to the floor, he conceded, would really be about electoral politics ahead of midterms this year in which Republicans expect to take back the House and possibly the Senate, and the presidential contest in two years’ time.“Once we know where people are at,” he said, “then we can say, ‘All right, look, we have 50 votes here, we have just one vote here, 49 votes here. “But what has bothered me very much is Republicans are laughing all the way to election day. They have not had to cast one bloody vote, or two, which shows us where they’re at. And we’ve got to change.”TopicsBernie SandersUS SenateUS CongressDemocratsBiden administrationUS politicsUS domestic policynewsReuse this content More