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      Georgia runoff: full steam ahead for Democrats as they aim to solidify Senate majority

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      Georgia runoff: full steam ahead for Democrats as they aim to solidify Senate majorityPolls suggest narrow lead for Raphael Warnock as party brings out big guns to campaign days before election A marathon election campaign will enter its final sprint on Tuesday when voters in Georgia decide the last seat in the US Senate – and shape the next phase of Joe Biden’s presidency.Opinion polls suggest a narrow lead for incumbent Democratic senator Raphael Warnock over his Republican challenger, former American football star Herschel Walker.Georgia candidates’ starkly divergent views on race could be key in runoffRead moreVictory for Warnock would give Democrats 51 seats in the 100-seat Senate, a stronger hand than they currently hold in an evenly split chamber where Vice-President Kamala Harris casts the tiebreaker.It is the second time in two years that a Senate race has gone to a runoff in Georgia because neither candidate secured a majority on election day. But the Peach State is showing little sign of election fatigue with officials reporting record early voting turnout.National and state Democrats are also not slowing down as they come out to support Warnock. Last week saw celebrity-led events including a concert by the Dave Matthews Band, canvassing with actresses Tessa Thompson and America Ferrera, and a rally targeting Georgia’s Asian American community featuring Jeannie Mai Jenkins and Daniel Dae Kim.Warnock, pastor of Martin Luther King’s former church, closed out the week with a rally in Atlanta led by the party’s biggest star, Barack Obama. “I’m here to tell you that we can’t let up,” the ex-president said after ascending the stage to roars and chants. “I’m here to tell you we can’t tune out. We can’t be complacent. We have to run through the tape. And I know you can do it because you did it before.”The event felt like a baptist sermon as, with nearly every sentence the former president uttered, the crowd cheered and responded with “yeah,” “alright,” and “come-on,” illustrating Georgia’s geography in the deep south squarely in the Bible Belt.Obama has been liberated, punchy and sardonic on the midterm campaign trail, eviscerating Republicans in a way that few Democrats can. He said: “Since the last time I was here, Mr Walker has been talking about issues that are of great importance to the people of Georgia. Like whether it’s better to be a vampire or a werewolf. This is a debate that I must confess I once had myself. When I was seven. Then I grew up.”He added: “In case you’re wondering, by the way, Mr Walker decided he wanted to be a werewolf. Which is great. As far as I’m concerned, he can be anything he wants to be, except for a United States senator.”As Florida turns Republican red, Georgia is emerging as one of the most critical swing states in the country. Biden’s victory over President Donald Trump there in 2020 helped propel him to the White House. Warnock and fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff won Senate seats in January 2021 following a runoff, giving their party control of the chamber.Obama praised Georgians’ ability to influence the landscape of national politics, reeling off post-2020 achievements such as infrastructure spending, gun safety legislation, cuts to prescription drug prices and a record investment in clean energy. “That happened because of you, Georgia. And now we need you to do it again.”Democrats hope that Obama’s intervention will energise the party base. Ashley Davis, a student who attended the rally, said: “I’m ready. I’ve been canvassing since the start of the election, and I am phone banking too. I am feeling invigorated by that speech because it’s so true. We can’t stop because we know what’s at stake. Georgia is ready, and we have shown that we are a force to be reckoned with.”Biden, by contrast, has stayed away amid concerns that he could be a drag on Warnock. Instead he is aiming to help the campaign from afar, a strategy that proved successful in the midterms as Democrats defied expectations.On Friday the president joined a phone bank run by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Boston, Massachusetts, to help Warnock’s campaign and drew a sharp contrast with Walker. “This is not a referendum on Warnock,” he said. “This is a choice – a choice between two men … One doesn’t deserve to be in the United States Senate based on his veracity and what he said and what he hadn’t said. The other man is a really, truly decent, honourable guy.”Republicans won every other statewide Georgia race last month. Governor Brian Kemp, who won re-election, has now thrown his weight behind Walker. A strong election day turnout by the party’s voters could still push the ex-football player to victory.But Walker has proved a motivator for Democratic enthusiasm because he is endorsed by Trump, lacks political pedigree and has made a series of weird and wild statements. One flyer mailed to homes by the Democratic Party of Georgia asks: “How embarrassed would you be if Herschel Walker was your senator?”Walker’s campaign has been plagued by accusations that he abused girlfriends in the past and paid for their abortions, undermining his anti-abortion stance. Recently he has faced claims that he maintains his primary residence in Texas, not Georgia. Walker has denied the allegations.Warnock narrowly edged Walker in the 8 November election by 49.44% to 48.49%. An Emerson College Polling/ The Hill survey of Georgia voters found Warnock at 49% support and Walker at 47%, with 4% undecided.John Zogby, an author and pollster, said: “Warnock must have gotten some kind of momentum from November 8 because Black voters appear to be more energised and they’re not going with Herschel Walker.“Walker’s had a number of issues that he’s had to contend with since November 8 and and he hasn’t handled them well. Even with Kemp’s help, which could be considerable, ultimately voters are not voting for who the governor wants them to vote for: they’re voting for the candidate.”While Democrats have already guaranteed control of the Senate for another two years, a true majority of 51 seats would speed up the confirmation process for Biden’s administrative and judicial nominees and provide a cushion for the president should any Democrats buck the party line.In addition, Democrats would gain more seats and financial resources on Senate committees, and committee chairs would no longer need any Republican support to issue subpoenas compelling witness testimony during investigations.Biden told reporters last month: “It’s always better with 51, because we’re in a situation where you don’t have to have an even makeup of the committees. And so that’s why it’s important, mostly. But it’s just simply better. The bigger the numbers, the better.”Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “It does make a big difference because Democrats would get a majority on almost all the committees. Court appointments will go zip, zip, zip because you get access to the floor much more easily as a clear majority party in the Senate.“Also, look how many old senators there are … If there’s an open seat and people are upset at Biden, they could end up voting Republican in any purple state.”TopicsGeorgiaUS politicsUS midterm elections 2022Joe BidenBarack ObamaUS SenatefeaturesReuse this content More

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      Georgia candidates’ starkly divergent views on race could be key in runoff

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      Georgia candidates’ starkly divergent views on race could be key in runoffSenate hopefuls Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker’s contrasting beliefs will influence how voters turn out As senator Raphael Warnock faces off against Republican challenger Herschel Walker in the most expensive race of the 2022 midterms, they also encounter a historic moment: it’s the first time in modern Georgia history that two Black candidates were nominated by both party’s voters to vie for a US Senate seat in the deep south state.Warnock and Walker both had experiences with poverty and Christianity during their upbringings yet their views on race and racism in society are now in stark contrast.In campaign speeches and previous remarks, Walker, who has been endorsed by former president Donald Trump, has argued racism in America doesn’t exist, asking supporters at an event earlier this year: “Where is this racism thing coming from?” Warnock, meanwhile, has spent years decrying racism, including lambasting Republican efforts at voting restrictions on the Senate floor as “Jim Crow in new clothes”.The pastor v the football player: can Raphael Warnock tackle Herschel Walker?Read morePolitical scientists and historians say that the contrasting views – Walker’s belief of an America “full of generous people” without racism, as he declared in one ad; Warnock’s belief in America dealing with racism as an “old sin” – influence how voters, specifically Black voters, will turn out and who they will support.Exit polling from November’s race showed that Black, Latino and Asian voters supported Warnock while Walker captured 70% of white voters.“When Walker is talking about racism doesn’t exist any more, for most Black people, that’s a non-starter,” said Andra Gillespie, associate professor of politics at Emory University. “On top of it, they look at his lack of qualifications. That is what would give them pause to say that they just put up any old Black person to try to run to this office. He was famous. That could be perceived as a sign of disrespect.”Gillespie says that the racial split in voting “maps on to party identification in the state” – meaning that in Georgia, those who align with the Republican and Democratic parties are “racially polarized”. She noted that Walker’s messaging tactics during the campaign to decry “woke” culture and arguing Warnock believes America is a “bad country full of racist people” shows he isn’t talking to Black voters, an influential voting bloc in a state that’s 30% Black.“When Walker uses Republican talking points and wants to talk about Democrats being divisive when talking about race, he is also signalling to white supporters that he’s not going to upset the applecart if you will,” she said. “The hope is that by hitting on personal issues and saying the same things that other folks would say, you hope to engage and mobilize and excite his supporters, the majority of whom are white.”Warnock and Walker’s life experiences shaped their views on race. Long before he became the senior pastor at Dr Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist church, Warnock grew up in a public housing complex in Savannah, Georgia, and immersed himself at a young age in the speeches of civil rights figures at his local library. Warnock eventually graduated from Morehouse College, a historically Black institution in Atlanta, in 1991.Before he became a wildly popular running back at the University of Georgia, Walker, who grew up in Wrightsville, more than 140 miles south-east of Atlanta, defied pleas from civil rights leaders who called for him to join racial justice protests in his community in 1980, which saw a group of whites beat Black protesters at the local courthouse, among other acts of racist violence. Walker chose not to get involved.Leah Wright Rigueur, a political historian at Johns Hopkins University, said Walker and Warnock’s contrasting views reflect “a common experience for those coming out of the immediate civil rights era: you either put your head down and shut up or you speak out and you fight”.Even so, Walker’s denial of racism does not reflect what a majority of even Black conservatives believe: a recent Pew Research Center study found that more than half of Black conservatives saw racism and police brutality as “extremely big problems” for Black people in the US. In her book The Loneliness of the Black Republican, Rigueur noted that research found that even conservative Black voters would not support candidates who they believe did not have their best interests at heart.Rigueur argues that the Republican party’s choice to back Walker, whose views are in contrast to even a majority of Black Republicans, represents an attempt to “pull a higher number of Black voters and/or disrupt the solidarity that was coalescing around Warnock”.‘Death by a thousand cuts’: Georgia’s new voting restrictions threaten midterm electionRead more“Walker does none of the things required to garner Black support: he’s not well-spoken, not well-versed in policy. He denies racism is an issue. He marches in lockstep with whatever the party line is,” she said, adding that Walker had alienated some white voters as well, particularly white women, who typically vote Republican.The scandals surrounding him, including that he paid for abortions for women, dismantle the “veneer of respectability of what it means to be a Republican”, Rigueur said. His lack of outreach and his decision not to campaign over Thanksgiving during a crucial early voting period, paired with his denial of racism’s existence, also relegates potential Black voters, who Republicans need to win in a changing electorate like Georgia. Rigueur added: “There has been no indication that he respects Black voters or that he actually is interested.“He is precisely the kind of candidate you don’t want to run in a place like Georgia,” she added. “You can no longer delude yourself or the public of these ideas that he’s a hometown hero with great conservative values and happens to be Black. You can’t buy into any of those things because he doesn’t live it and practice it.”What’s unique in the Warnock and Walker case isn’t so much that two Black men are facing off. That often happens in mayoral and state elections, and even at the federal level, just six years ago, South Carolina’s Tim Scott won re-election against Thomas Dixon, a Democratic Black pastor from north Charleston.But in Georgia, where Black voters often overwhelmingly vote Democrat, Warnock’s opponent is a Black Republican at a time when a record number of Black Republican candidates – 28 – ran for office during this year’s midterms and as there are three Black Republicans in Congress, the most since the Reconstruction era. Historically, when it comes to elections to national office, Black candidates have struggled to obtain the institutional backing from national parties and the financial investment needed to run successful national campaigns, Rigueur said.Recent efforts from grassroots, Black women-led civil rights groups in Georgia such as the New Georgia Project and Black Voters Matter who have been able to build an influential voting bloc through registration and outreach campaigns but also national investment in Black candidates from donors who see that growing influence.Republicans’ efforts to invest in Black candidates speaks to efforts to persuade a demographically changing electorate but the endorsement of Walker by Donald Trump “doesn’t negate the rest” of Trump’s “racially divisive presidency” nor does it negate Republican party’s “record on race in the last half century”, Gillespie said.“Herschel’s African American, yes, he is a revered native son of the state. But he’s also really inexperienced,” Gillespie said. “He has a lot of political baggage that in an earlier era would have been disqualifying right off the bat. To nominate somebody like that because he shares an identity with the other opponent, to some people, that looks like tokenism. It is something that a lot of voters are going to be turned off by.”Since 1870, just 11 Black Americans have served in the US Senate. If either Warnock or Walker win in Tuesday’s runoff, they would join the Democratic senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Republican senator Tim Scott as the only current Black members of the 100-person US Senate.“The fact that we’ve only ever had three at any given point still demonstrates that there’s a long way to go in terms of proportional representation by race,” Gillespie said.TopicsGeorgiaUS midterm elections 2022US politicsRaceDemocratsRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Newt Gingrich warns Republicans that Joe Biden is winning the fight

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      Newt Gingrich warns Republicans that Joe Biden is winning the fightFormer speaker who led charge against Bill Clinton raises eyebrows with column heralding Democrat’s first-term success Republicans must “quit underestimating” Joe Biden, the former US House speaker Newt Gingrich said, because the president is winning the fight.Biden tells Democrats to revise primary calendar to boost Black voters’ voicesRead moreWriting on his own website, Gingrich said: “Conservatives’ hostility to the Biden administration on our terms tends to blind us to just how effective Biden has been on his terms.“… We dislike Biden so much, we pettily focus on his speaking difficulties, sometimes strange behavior, clear lapses of memory and other personal flaws. Our aversion to him and his policies makes us underestimate him and the Democrats.”Gingrich’s words pleased the White House – Ron Klain, Joe Biden’s chief of staff, tweeted a link with the message: “You don’t have to take my word for it, any more.”The column also caused consternation among Washington commentators, in part because, as Axios put it, “a leader of the GOP’s ’90s-era New Right [is] arguing that Joe Biden is not just a winner – but a role model”.Gingrich has been a fierce partisan warrior ever since he entered Congress, in 1979, then as speaker led the charge against Bill Clinton, culminating in a failed attempt to remove the Democrat via impeachment. In the conclusion to his column, he used the term “Defeat Big Government Socialism” – a version of the title of his latest book.Gingrich told Axios: “I was thinking about football and the clarity of winning and losing. It hit me that, measured by his goals, Biden has been much more successful than we have been willing to credit.”Biden recently turned 80. He has said he will use the Christmas holiday to decide if he will run for re-election.Gingrich, 79, compared Biden to Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, the latter previously the oldest president ever in office, having been 77 when he left the White House in 1989.Reagan and Eisenhower, Gingrich said, “preferred to be underestimated” and “wanted people to think of them as pleasant – but not dangerous”, and thereby enjoyed great success.“Biden has achieved something similar,” Gingrich continued, by taking “an amazingly narrow four-vote majority in the US House and a 50-50 tie in the Senate and turn[ing] it into trillions of dollars in spending – and a series of radical bills”.Gingrich also accused Biden of pursuing “a strategy of polarizing Americans against Donald Trump supporters” – more than 950 of whom have been charged over the deadly Capitol riot they staged after the former president’s defeat in 2020 – and “grossly exaggerat[ing] the threat to abortion rights”, after the supreme court removed the right this year.But Gingrich also gave Biden credit on the chief foreign policy challenge of his first term in power. The president, the former speaker said, had “carefully and cautiously waged war in Ukraine with no American troops … US weapons and financial aid [helping] cripple what most thought would be an easy victory for Russian president Vladimir Putin”.The result, Gingrich said, was that last month “the Biden team had one of the best first-term off-year elections in history. They were not repudiated.”Gingrich advised Republicans “to look much more deeply at what worked and what did not work in 2020 and 2022”, as they prepare to face “almost inevitable second-time Democrat presidential nominee Biden”.According to Axios, Biden is thought likely to run. Friends of the first couple, the site said, “think only two things could stop him: health or Jill”, the first lady.TopicsJoe BidenBiden administrationNewt GingrichDemocratsRepublicansUS midterm elections 2022US elections 2024newsReuse this content More

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      Joe Biden condemns antisemitism following Kanye West’s remarks: ‘Silence is complicity’ – as it happened

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      Kanye West’s suspension from Twitter after the rapper posted an image blending a swastika with a star of David, following an interview in which he praised Adolf Hitler and denied the Holocaust, appears to have caught the eye of Joe Biden.The president tweeted his own response on Friday morning, not directly addressing West, who now goes by the name of Ye, but saying he wanted “to make a few things clear”.I just want to make a few things clear:The Holocaust happened. Hitler was a demonic figure. And instead of giving it a platform, our political leaders should be calling out and rejecting antisemitism wherever it hides. Silence is complicity.— President Biden (@POTUS) December 2, 2022
      “The Holocaust happened. Hitler was a demonic figure. And instead of giving it a platform, our political leaders should be calling out and rejecting antisemitism wherever it hides. Silence is complicity,” he wrote.His tweet alludes to Republican leaders who either chose to not to speak our, or offered only tepid criticism of Donald Trump hosting West and fellow Holocaust denier and white supremacist Nick Fuentes at a dinner at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.Read more:Kanye West suspended from Twitter after posting swastika inside Star of DavidRead moreThanks for joining us today, and through the week, for the US politics blog. We’re closing it now for the day.
      Joe Biden had a busy Friday. He’s currently in Boston, where he’s talking with Prince William about the climate emergency.
      The president has been speaking out about antisemitic hate speech in a forthright tweet condemning political leaders whose silence, he says, equals “complicity”. It comes after Twitter suspended the account of rapper Kanye West for inciting violence with offensive, anti-Jewish posts.
      Closing arguments in the criminal tax fraud trial of the Trump Organization have wrapped up in New York. Former president Donald Trump is not on trial, but prosecutors say he was fully aware of an illegal scheme perpetrated by top executives of his real estate company. Jurors will deliberate next week.
      Pat Cipollone, Trump’s former White House counsel, was spotted entering the grand jury area of the US district court in Washington DC on Friday, CNN reported, in the justice department’s January 6 case.
      Democrats voted to remove Iowa as the leadoff state on the presidential nominating calendar and replace it with South Carolina starting in 2024. The move was championed by Joe Biden to better reflect the party’s deeply diverse electorate.
      Biden said the US had dodged an “economic catastrophe” after Congress approved legislation averting a nationwide rail shutdown on 9 December. The president signed a law imposing a labor settlement on rail workers that did not include paid time off that unions had demanded.
      A 15-year-old canvassing for Georgia senator Raphael Warnock was shot through the door of a house he knocked at on Thursday, according to police in Savannah. The youth was hit in the leg, and is expected to survive. A 42-year-old man was arrested.
      Please join us again next week for a consequential week in the US Senate. The runoff election between Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker is on Tuesday, and victory for the incumbent would give Democrats a 51-49 advantage in the chamber.Democrats voted Friday to remove Iowa as the leadoff state on the presidential nominating calendar and replace it with South Carolina starting in 2024, the Associated Press reports.It is a dramatic shakeup championed by Joe Biden to better reflect the party’s deeply diverse electorate.BREAKING: Democrats voted to remove Iowa as the leadoff state on the presidential nominating calendar and replace it with South Carolina starting in 2024, a dramatic shakeup championed by President Biden to better reflect the party’s diverse electorate. https://t.co/3gKEcLOpPQ— The Associated Press (@AP) December 2, 2022
      The Democratic National Committee’s rule-making arm made the move to strip Iowa from the position it has held for more than four decades after technical meltdowns sparked chaos and marred results of the state’s 2020 caucus. The change also comes after a long push by some of the party’s top leaders to start choosing a president in states that are less white, especially given the importance of Black voters as Democrats’ most loyal electoral base.Read more:Biden tells Democrats to revise primary calendar to boost Black voters’ voicesRead moreDemocrats are poised to shake up the way in which they nominate presidential candidates, after Joe Biden said the primary process should better represent the party’s non-white voters, Adam Gabbatt writes.Biden has reportedly told Democrats that Iowa, the state that has led off the Democratic voting calendar since 1976, should be moved down the calendar, with South Carolina instead going first.The move would see New Hampshire, which has technically held the nation’s first primary since 1920 (Iowa uses a slightly different system of caucuses, or in-person voting), shunted down the calendar.Both Iowa and New Hampshire are predominantly white states. Clamor has been growing inside and outside the Democratic party for a different state, with a population more representative of the US as a whole, to be given the first go.Associated Press reported that Biden had written to the Democratic National Committee regarding the proposal. The DNC’s rules committee is meeting on Friday to vote on the primary calendar.“For decades, Black voters in particular have been the backbone of the Democratic party but have been pushed to the back of the early primary process,” Biden wrote.“We rely on these voters in elections but have not recognized their importance in our nominating calendar. It is time to stop taking these voters for granted, and time to give them a louder and earlier voice in the process.”Read the full story:Biden tells Democrats to revise primary calendar to boost Black voters’ voiceRead moreJoe Biden has welcomed the Prince of Wales to Boston, where they will have a discussion about the climate emergency at the John F Kennedy presidential library and museum.The president and Prince William exchanged a warm handshake and posed briefly for photographs before heading inside.The Prince and Princess of Wales, who earlier visited the Center for the Developing Child at Harvard University, are on the third and final day of what has been a turbulent visit to the US.Before meeting with Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard, the Princess of Wales greeted crowds in Harvard Square pic.twitter.com/NVWgjj2UV1— Harvard University (@Harvard) December 2, 2022
      They are seeking to end the trip on a high note at an award ceremony later for award ceremony for Prince William’s environmental Earthshot prize.Read more:William and Kate seek to end US trip on positive note after turbulent weekRead morePolice in Savannah, Georgia, have charged a 42-year-old man they say shot a teenage canvasser for incumbent Democratic senator Raphael Warnock.Authorities say the youth was on the campaign trail when he was wounded, and was shot through the front door of a house he had knocked at.Today is the final day of early voting ahead of next Tuesday’s Senate runoff, in which Warnock holds a narrow polling advantage over Republican challenger Herschel Walker. More than 1.5m votes have already been cast.The incident took place on Thursday. The 15-year-old was shot in the leg and sustained non life-threating injuries.#NewsRelease SPD Arrests Suspect in Hartridge Street Shooting https://t.co/8GsECFjjeH— Savannah Police Department (@SavPolice) December 2, 2022
      A press release from the Savannah police department says “at this point, there is no indication the shooting was politically motivated”.But it adds: “According to the preliminary investigation, the teen was campaigning for Raphael Warnock for the upcoming run-off election when the incident occurred. While at the front door of one of the residences on Hartridge Street, the suspect fired a shot through the closed door, striking the teen.“Officers quickly identified and located the suspect, Jimmy Paiz, at the residence. Paiz was booked into the Chatham County jail on charges of aggravated assault and aggravated battery.”In her Air Force One mini-briefing, Karine Jean-Pierre was pressed on how Joe Biden intended to secure paid leave for all workers. During his signing earlier today of legislation averting a nationwide rail shutdown, which did not include such a provision for rail workers, the president said he would be “coming back at it”.It seems there’s no specific plan. The White House press secretary said:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}He’ll continue forcefully advocating for Congress and employers to extend paid sick leave to all workers. That’s what’s important. As you can tell from his remarks this afternoon, the president’s focus remains, again, on getting Congress to act.Biden won’t, however, be returning to Congress to fix the “glitches” in the Inflation Reduction Act he conceded yesterday, during a visit by President Emmanuel Macron of France, had upset European countries.The president said Thursday they were fixable. When asked on Friday how, Jean-Pierre responded:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}We don’t have any plans to go back to Congress for legislative changes. There is a complex implementation and process which is actively underway at federal agencies, but… we’re not going to be addressing any glitches.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has been expanding on Joe Biden’s earlier tweet calling out antisemitic hate speech.It follows Twitter’s decision to suspend the rapper Kanye West for making offensive posts, including an image of a swastika blended with a Star of David.“It doesn’t matter who [says it],” Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One as the president headed to Boston to meet the Prince and Princess of Wales. “What the President is trying to say is being silent is complicit. And when we see this type of hatred when we see the some type of antisemitism, we need to call it out.”Jean-Pierre was asked several times who Biden was addressing, and whether it was a direct response to West’s message.She added: “The president is standing with the Jewish community. The common theme of all forms of bigotry is that hate doesn’t go away, it only hides the grotesque poison of antisemitism.“Just yesterday he and President Macron [of France] recognized the hundreds of thousands of Americans who gave their lives to overcome the horror of Nazism and keep us free. And so he believes as president is important to speak up.”Prosecutors resumed closing arguments Friday in the Trump Organization’s criminal tax fraud trial, promising to share previously unrevealed details about Donald Trump’s knowledge of a tax dodge scheme hatched by one of his top executives, the Associated Press reports.“Donald Trump knew exactly what was going on with his top executives,” assistant Manhattan district attorney Joshua Steinglass told jurors on Thursday during the first half of his closing argument, adding: “We will come back to that later.”Trump himself is not on trial, but the company that bears his name, through which he manages real estate holdings and other ventures, faces fines of more than $1m if convicted of helping executives avoid paying income taxes on company-paid perks such as Manhattan apartments and luxury cars.The tax fraud case is the only trial to arise from the three-year investigation of Trump and his business practices by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. The company has denied wrongdoing.Steinglass told jurors that two executives involved in the scheme, longtime finance chief Allen Weisselberg and controller Jeffrey McConney, were “high managerial” agents entrusted to act on behalf of the company and its various entities.The defense has alleged that Weisselberg came up with the tax dodge scheme on his own without Trump, or the Trump family knowing, and that the company didn’t benefit from his actions. Weisselberg testified that Trump didn’t know, but that the Trump Organization did derive some benefit because it didn’t have to pay him as much in actual salary.“Their entire theory of the case is a fraud,” Steinglass said, insisting the former president had full knowledge of everything that occurred.Jurors are expected to deliberate next week.The Colorado secretary of state has ordered a recount in the congressional race where extremist Republican Lauren Boebert led Democrat Adam Frisch by just 550 votes in an unexpectedly tight race.The Associated Press has declared the race too close to call and will await the results of the recount. The recount, which was expected, was formally announced Wednesday.One week after the polls closed, Boebert claimed victory and Frisch conceded. Frisch, a former city councilman from Aspen, acknowledges a recount is unlikely to change the results, the AP says.In a virtual press conference announcing his concession, Frisch argued that the thin margin is its own small victory after his campaign was largely considered futile by the political establishment. He added that he hasn’t ruled out another bid for the seat in 2024.It’s been a lively morning in US politics news and there’s more to come. We’ll shortly have a post on closing arguments in the Trump Organization trial in New York.Joe Biden’s on his to Boston to meet Britain’s Prince William and his wife, Kate, the princess of Wales, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will gaggle aboard Air Force One around the half hour (if the White House is on stated schedule, which is rarely.)Here’s where things stand:
      Joe Biden used Twitter to condemn antisemitism and political leaders who fail to call it out, following Ye’s suspension from Twitter after the rapper formerly named Kanye West posted an image blending a swastika with a star of David, following an interview in which he praised Adolf Hitler and denied the Holocaust.
      Pat Cipollone, former White House counsel for Donald Trump, was spotted entering the grand jury area of the US district court in Washington DC on Friday, CNN is reported, in the DoJ’s January 6 case.
      Biden said the US has dodged an “economic catastrophe” after Congress approved legislation averting a nationwide rail shutdown on 9 December. The president was speaking at the White House before signing legislation that was approved in the Senate on Thursday and which imposes a labor settlement on rail workers who were poised to strike in a dispute over pay and conditions. More

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      January 6 panel mulls criminal referrals as Trump sees setback in Mar-a-Lago case – live

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      The January 6 House panel investigating the Capitol attack, and Donald Trump’s insurrection, is set to meet in private on Friday as it prepares to mull criminal charges against the former president.The “walls closing in on Trump” headline has been written often, but this time with an elevated degree of peril for a man who recently announced his third run at the White House as a Republican.A subcommittee formed in October to make recommendations will present its report to the full panel today, according to NPR, and a determination on recommending any particular action will follow in short order.“We’ll just accept the report, and probably one day next week, make a decision one way or another,” Mississippi Democratic Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chair, told the network.The committee is expected to release its final report around the middle of this month, and it is expected to focus heavily on Trump’s involvement in the Capitol attack and his potential culpability.The Guardian reported last week that it has provoked something of a rift between panel members, with some believing it concentrates too much on Trump himself, and not enough of alleged intelligence failures by the FBI that resulted in the Capitol being overrun by supporters he incited.New: Jan. 6 committee chair Bennie Thompson tells me the full committee will receive the subcommittee’s recommendations tomorrow at 8:30a but likely wont make a decision on referrals and what to do about subpoenaed GOP members until next week.— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) December 1, 2022
      Members of the subcommittee, which is chaired by Democrat Jamie Raskin, and includes Republican Liz Cheney alongside other Democrats Adam Schiff and Zoe Lofgren, all have a legal background, or, in Schiff’s case, prosecutorial experience.As well as making recommendations on criminal charges, the subcommittee was also tasked with resolving how to respond to Trump’s lawsuit against his subpoena.Read more:January 6 report expected to focus on Trump’s role and potential culpabilityRead moreLate on Thursday, a federal appeals court delivered a major blow to Donald Trump by knocking down the appointment of a special master to look at documents seized by the FBI from the former president’s Florida resort.The court also sternly rebuked Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed judge who assigned the special master, for meddling in a justice department investigation. Here’s my colleague Hugo Lowell’s report:A federal appeals court on Thursday terminated the special master review of documents seized from Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago property, paving the way for the justice department to regain access to the entirety of the materials for use in the criminal investigation surrounding the former president.The decision by the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit marked a decisive defeat for Trump in a ruling that said a lower-court judge should never have granted his request for an independent arbiter in the first place and is unlikely to be overturned in the event of appeal.“The law is clear,” the appeals court wrote in an unanimous 23-page opinion. “We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.”The ruling removed the lower-court judge’s order, allowing federal prosecutors to use the unclassified documents – in addition to the documents marked classified they previously regained in an earlier appeal – in the criminal investigation examining Trump’s mishandling of national security materials.Trump can only appeal to the US supreme court, according to local rules in the 11th circuit, though it was not immediately clear whether he would do so. The former president has lost multiple cases before the supreme court, most recently including whether Congress can get access to his tax returns.In a statement, a Trump spokesman said: “The decision does not address the merits that clearly demonstrate the impropriety of the unprecedented, illegal and unwarranted raid on Mar-a-Lago. President Donald J Trump will continue to fight against the weaponized Department of ‘Justice.’”Read the full story:US court strikes down appointment of special master to review Trump recordsRead moreWhile we’re looking at the machinations of the January 6 House committee, we’re certainly not the only ones. Republicans, already committed to shutting down the panel when they assume control of the House next month (assuming it hasn’t done so itself by then) appear dead set on investigating the investigators.MSNBC’s MaddowBlog, from the Rachel Maddow show, takes a closer look at would-be Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s role in the plan, in an article published Friday.The House minority leader, if he wins enough party support to get the gavel of course, appears eager not to find answers about the 6 January Capitol attacks, or Donald Trump’s desperate efforts to retain the presidency despite his defeat by Joe Biden.Instead, he wants to cast shade on the integrity of the bipartisan panel. In a letter last week, reported by the New York Times, he wrote to the committee chair Bennie Thompson, ordering him to preserve all documents, including transcripts of more than 1,000 interviews. It’s being seen purely as a political display, as it’s something the panel would have to do anyway.This from a man who resolutely refused to cooperate with the panel last year when he received a subpoena.According to MSNBC, the tactics of McCarthy and the Republicans are “intended to discredit probes they consider politically inconvenient”. You can read the MSNBC report here.The January 6 House panel investigating the Capitol attack, and Donald Trump’s insurrection, is set to meet in private on Friday as it prepares to mull criminal charges against the former president.The “walls closing in on Trump” headline has been written often, but this time with an elevated degree of peril for a man who recently announced his third run at the White House as a Republican.A subcommittee formed in October to make recommendations will present its report to the full panel today, according to NPR, and a determination on recommending any particular action will follow in short order.“We’ll just accept the report, and probably one day next week, make a decision one way or another,” Mississippi Democratic Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chair, told the network.The committee is expected to release its final report around the middle of this month, and it is expected to focus heavily on Trump’s involvement in the Capitol attack and his potential culpability.The Guardian reported last week that it has provoked something of a rift between panel members, with some believing it concentrates too much on Trump himself, and not enough of alleged intelligence failures by the FBI that resulted in the Capitol being overrun by supporters he incited.New: Jan. 6 committee chair Bennie Thompson tells me the full committee will receive the subcommittee’s recommendations tomorrow at 8:30a but likely wont make a decision on referrals and what to do about subpoenaed GOP members until next week.— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) December 1, 2022
      Members of the subcommittee, which is chaired by Democrat Jamie Raskin, and includes Republican Liz Cheney alongside other Democrats Adam Schiff and Zoe Lofgren, all have a legal background, or, in Schiff’s case, prosecutorial experience.As well as making recommendations on criminal charges, the subcommittee was also tasked with resolving how to respond to Trump’s lawsuit against his subpoena.Read more:January 6 report expected to focus on Trump’s role and potential culpabilityRead moreThe White House has announced that Joe Biden will deliver live remarks at 10.15am as he signs legislation averting a national rail strike.The Senate voted 80-15 on Thursday to progress an imposed settlement on rail workers, one day after the House did the same.Biden, who became known as Amtrak Joe for his days riding the railroad to and from the Capitol when he was a senator, is likely to praise the speed at which Congress moved to avoid the planned 9 December shutdown. Biden’s pushing of the settlement, however, is not without controversy. Read more here:Biden just knifed labor unions in the back. They shouldn’t forget it | Hamilton NolanRead moreGood morning politics blog readers, and happy Friday. It’s a big day for the January 6 House committee investigating Donald Trump’s insurrection as it meets to mull potential criminal referrals for the former president, and those in his inner circle.The bipartisan panel’s closed-doors meeting follows a massive setback late on Thursday for Trump’s tactics of obstructing a parallel justice department inquiry into his improper handling of classified documents at his Florida resort. A federal appeals court struck down the assignment of an independent special master reviewing the documents, and delivered a direct rebuke for the Trump-appointed judge who engaged him.We’ll have plenty more about those developments coming up.Here’s what else we’re watching Friday on what promises to be a busy day:
      Joe Biden has picked up an unexpected fan in the form of Republican firebrand Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker who says the president is getting things right and enjoyed one of the best first-term midterm elections in history.
      Biden will meet the Prince and Princess of Wales later today at the John F Kennedy presidential library in Boston.
      White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief reporters at lunchtime aboard Air Force One en route to Boston.
      It’s the last day of early voting ahead of next Tuesday’s crucial Senate run-off in Gerogia. Latest polls give Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock a 3-4% lead over Republican challenger Herschel Walker. More

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      Rural Arizona county certifies midterm results after judge orders vote

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      Rural Arizona county certifies midterm results after judge orders voteThe Cochise county board of supervisors voted 2-0 to approve the results after threat of lawsuits A rural Arizona county finally certified its election results on Thursday after a judge ordered the county’s board of supervisors to do their jobs just a couple of hours earlier.The Cochise county board of supervisors voted 2-0 to approve the midterm results, allowing the statewide canvass of the election to continue as planned on 5 December. A third member of the board who had spearheaded the effort to delay certification, Tom Crosby, did not attend the vote.Obama heads to Georgia as Herschel Walker faces new violence claimRead moreSupervisor Peggy Judd, who initially voted to delay the certification, later voted in favor after the court order.“I am not ashamed of anything I did,” Judd said during Thursday’s certification vote. “And today … because of a court ruling, and because of my own health and situations that are going on in our life, I feel like I must follow what the judge did today or asked us to do, but I feel I don’t like to be threatened.”After the county refused to certify by the 28 November deadline set by state law, it faced lawsuits from the Arizona secretary of state and the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans. The lawsuits were heard in court Thursday, with Pima county superior court judge Casey McGinley swiftly ruling that the board was required to canvass its results by that afternoon. McGinley said there was no legal basis for the board to delay or refuse to certify.The county attorney would not represent the two supervisors who voted against certifying the election, and neither would an outside attorney the board first wanted to help. Instead, an attorney was only named earlier on Thursday and did not make it to the court hearing, leaving the sued supervisors without legal representation. While Crosby wanted to continue the hearing to allow the new lawyer to get to know the case, McGinley said it would move forward immediately.A delay of the statewide certification process held huge potential consequences: Two statewide recounts, required by law, couldn’t start until the canvass was complete. Lawsuits from candidates and other groups can’t begin without official results. Voters in the county could be disenfranchised if their votes weren’t included in statewide totals. The continuity of state government itself may have been in danger, the secretary of state’s office warned.Ann English, the chair of the board and its lone Democrat, has repeatedly voted for certifying the election and against previous efforts by her colleagues to conduct a full hand count of ballots, later declared unlawful. During Thursday’s certification, she said she hopes the people pushing for not certifying realize “there’s a place for change in the legislation, and it isn’t here – we react to the legislation, we don’t create legislation for the state”.‘Extremists didn’t make it’: why Republicans flopped in once-red ArizonaRead moreAlthough the lawsuits were successful in getting the county to do its election duties, others want to see the two supervisors face criminal charges for flouting election law. One state law says a person charged with any election-related duty who refuses to perform that duty in violation of law is guilty of a class-six felony.Terry Goddard, a former Arizona attorney general, and Rick Romley, a former Maricopa county attorney, wrote a letter to the current attorney general, Mark Brnovich, and Cochise county attorney Brian McIntyre asking them to investigate and consider criminal charges for Crosby and Judd. McIntyre has said he’s weighing whether to bring charges.“Failing to hold supervisors Crosby and Judd accountable for their violations of law could embolden other public officials to abandon their legal duties in future elections,” Goddard and Romley wrote. “This would pose a substantial threat to election administration in Arizona.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022ArizonaUS CongressUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Record early voting in runoff for Georgia Senate seat

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      Record early voting in runoff for Georgia Senate seatMonday the largest in-person early voting day as Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker neck and neck before 6 December election The number of people casting early ballots in the runoff election for one of Georgia’s seats in the US Senate has already broken records since the process began on the weekend, with some counties posting staggeringly long wait times at early voting sites during the first days of early voting.Reports on Monday’s turnout varied from more than 250,000 voters to more than 300,000 on the first day of statewide early operation of the polls. Some counties began earlier.Herschel Walker accuser comes forward with fresh relationship claimsRead moreAs of mid-afternoon Tuesday, 11 of 27 early voting locations in Fulton county, the state’s most populous, had a wait time of at least an hour. Several reported wait times of more than two hours.In Gwinnett county, in suburban Atlanta, eight of the 11 early voting sites reported wait times of at least 45 minutes, including three sites with wait times of more than an hour. Zach Manifold, the county’s election administrator, attributed the long waits to “heavy turnout and only seven days of advance voting”. Georgia Republicans passed a law last year that shortened the runoff period from nine weeks to four.Manifold said his county was operating at “maximum capacity on check-ins” and was equipped to handle about 20,000 voters a day. Nearly 18,000 people voted in person in the county on Monday, according to state data.The incumbent Democrat, Raphael Warnock, and his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker, are neck and neck as the election on 6 December approaches. The deputy secretary of state, Gabriel Sterling, said it was the largest in-person early voting day in Georgia history.Just…WOW! GA voters, facilitated through the hard work of county election & poll workers, have shattered the old Early Vote turnout, with 300,438 Georgians casting their votes today. They blew up the old record of 233k votes in a day. Way to go voters & election workers. #gapol pic.twitter.com/rYbmpjAs43— Gabriel Sterling (@GabrielSterling) November 29, 2022
      Neither candidate got above the 50% threshold in the midterm elections earlier this month, so under Georgia rules the fierce race went to a runoff.With just a week to go before polls close, progressives in Georgia are leaving nothing to chance. A coalition of progressive groups has launched a massive canvassing effort for the Democratic party.Leaders of the coalition, known as Georgia Organizers for Active Transformation, said on a Monday press call that they now have 2,500 canvassers knocking on 200,000 doors a day, and that canvassers have knocked on more than 2.5m doors in the three weeks since election day.The early voting numbers appear to indicate that the effort is paying dividends. According to the progressive group Progress Georgia, African Americans and women are currently outpacing their high turnout levels in the 2020 general election. Given that those constituencies lean toward Democrats, the early voting data could provide some reassurance to Warnock’s camp as he defends a seat he has only held since 2021.“Georgia voters know exactly what’s going on,” said Hillary Holley, a coalition leader and the executive director of Care in Action. “They know what the stakes are, and they want Warnock to remain representing them for six additional years.”Despite the extensive efforts of progressive organizers, the state’s early voting operation has run into some significant issues. Many voters reported long lines at polling places over the weekend, with Warnock himself waiting in line for about an hour on Sunday to cast his vote.Misunderstandings about voting rules appear to be widespread, according to Holley. “Every time basically our canvassers reach a voter at their house they’re saying, ‘Thank you so much because we are so confused about when we can go vote,’” she said.Part of that confusion stems from a judge’s last-minute ruling that counties could allow early voting to occur on the Saturday after the Thanksgiving holiday.Georgia election officials had initially said that early voting could not take place on that day, but the Warnock campaign won a legal challenge to expand voting hours.Stephanie Jackson Ali, policy director of the progressive group New Georgia Project, said: “Our call is for counties to continue the fight to get more locations open, to continue the fight to keep your counties open late, and for our voters to stay in line.”TopicsGeorgiaDemocratsUS midterm elections 2022US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Arizona secretary of state sues after Republican officials refuse to certify county election results

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      Arizona secretary of state sues after Republican officials refuse to certify county election resultsCochise county officials have endorsed claims of voter fraud despite no evidence of any problems Republican officials in a rural Arizona county refused on Monday to certify the results of the 2022 midterm election, despite no evidence of anything wrong with the count from earlier this month.Some officials who have embraced voter fraud theories held out, defying a state deadline and setting the stage for a legal battle.‘Extremists didn’t make it’: why Republicans flopped in once-red ArizonaRead moreThe move came amid pressure from prominent Republicans to reject results showing Democrats winning top races, and the county was holding out in the afternoon of a nail-biting day that was the deadline for several counties to confirm results.In a lawsuit on Monday, the secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who narrowly won the race for governor, asked a judge to order county officials to canvass the election, which she said was an obligation under Arizona law. Lawyers representing a Cochise county voter and a group of retirees filed a similar lawsuit on Monday, the deadline for counties to approve the official tally of votes, known as the canvass.The two Republican county supervisors delayed the canvass vote until hearing once more about concerns over the certification of ballot tabulators, though election officials have repeatedly said the equipment is properly approved.The state elections director, Kori Lorick, wrote in a letter last week that Hobbs was required by law to approve the statewide canvass by next week and would have to exclude Cochise county’s votes if they weren’t received in time.That would threaten to flip the victor in at least two close races, a US House seat and state schools chief, from a Republican to a Democrat.Hobbs’ lawsuit asks the Cochise county superior court to order officials to certify the results by Thursday. Failing to certify them would undermine the will of the county’s voters “and sow further confusion and doubt about the integrity of Arizona‘s election system”, lawyers for Hobbs wrote.“The board of supervisors had all of the information they needed to certify this election and failed to uphold their responsibility for Cochise voters,” Sophia Solis, a spokeswoman for Hobbs, said in an email.Democratic election attorney Marc Elias also pledged, via Twitter, to sue the county.Elsewhere, Republican supervisors in Mohave county postponed a certification vote until later on Monday after hearing comments from residents angry about problems with ballot printers in Maricopa county.Officials in Maricopa county, the state’s largest, where the state capital Phoenix is located, said everyone had a chance to vote and all legal ballots were counted.Election results have largely been certified without issue in jurisdictions across the nation despite tub-thumping by rightwingers during their campaigns who sought to undermine public faith in US democracy. Many of the most extreme candidates lost.But it has been a rockier road in Arizona, which became a focal point for efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election and push false narratives of fraud, following Joe Biden’s surprise win in the state – a result that was first called by Fox News, another fact that infuriated Trump as he railed against losing the White House.Arizona was long a GOP stronghold, but this month Democrats won most of the highest-profile races over Trumpist Republicans.Lake, who lost the governor’s race to Hobbs, and Mark Finchem, the candidate for secretary of state, have refused to acknowledge their midterm election losses, however. They blame Republican election officials in Maricopa county for a problem with some ballot printers.David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the officials delaying certification were breeding an illegitimate distrust in elections and disenfranchising voters.“In the last year, it’s become an unprecedented dereliction of duty for county officials to violate their oaths of office and refuse to certify election results, citing ‘gut feelings’ or alleged problems in [other] jurisdictions,” Becker said.Navajo, a rural Republican-leaning county, conservative Yavapai county and Coconino, which is staunchly Democratic, voted to certify on Monday.In Cochise county, GOP supervisors demanded last week that the secretary of state prove vote-counting machines were legally certified before they would approve the election results.State elections director Kori Lorick has said the machines are properly certified for use in elections. She wrote in a letter last week that the state would sue to force Cochise county supervisors to certify, and if they don’t do so by the deadline for the statewide canvass on 5 December, the county’s votes would be excluded.That move threatens to flip the victor in at least two close races – a US House seat and state schools chief – from Republican to Democrat. TopicsUS midterm elections 2022ArizonaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More