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      ‘Harm to children was part of the point’: a harrowing film on US family separations

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      He thought he was working in the past tense, making a film about what one Republican-appointed judge described as “one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country”. Then Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. Now Errol Morris’s documentary about family separations at the US-Mexico border looks like a dreadful premonition.“It’s interesting how things have radically changed,” Morris says via Zoom from a book-lined office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The movie, which presumably is recounting past history, seems to be a crystal ball into what may happen next and that was not clearly imagined at the outset. But it is clearly suggested now.”Separated is based on the NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff’s book Separated: Inside an American Tragedy (“one of the best collaborations I’ve ever had”, says the Oscar-winning Morris) and premieres on the MSNBC network on 7 December. It is an excruciatingly timely reminder of how Trump ripped 5,500 children from their parents (up to 1,400 of whom are not yet confirmed as reunited).The 93-minute documentary forensically details how the first Trump administration’s policy of family separations was deliberate, systematic and intentionally inhumane, leaving children in wire-mesh cages with feelings of fear and abandonment. Trump said with casual cruelty: “When you have that policy, people don’t come. I know it sounds harsh but we have to save our country.”Wearing white shirt and spectacles, sipping from a white coffee mug and speaking slowly in honeyed tones, Morris reflects: “The separations was an abomination. It was racist, was cruel, was unnecessary. As one of the interviewees in my film says, there were other levers that we could pull. This seemed to be something we did not need to do.”Trump had come into office promising a crackdown on illegal immigration including the construction of a border wall. The pre-existing catch-and-release scheme (which had allowed migrants to remain in the country until their immigration hearing) was ditched in favour of something more draconian.Family separations under his administration began as early as March 2017 under a pilot programme in El Paso, Texas. The fact it is was happening covertly undermines the notion that it could act as a deterrent.A “zero tolerance” policy, officially announced in spring 2018, marked a significant escalation. It mandated the prosecution of all adults crossing the border illegally. Anyone who did not arrive at a designated port of entry and claimed asylum would be arrested.While the policy never specifically called for children to be taken from parents, separation became inevitable because the adult was detained and charged. Since children were not allowed to be held in a federal jail, they were taken from their parents and placed in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).Jonathan White, a civil servant who worked at the ORR and fought against the policy, says in the film: “Harm to children was part of the point. They believed it would terrify families into not coming.”Images of children held in cages in a McAllen, Texas, facility triggered outrage in June 2018. But Homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen denied that there was a policy of separating families at the border and sought to shift blame to Congress, even though the enforcement of laws happens at the president’s discretion. The Bush and Obama administrations had largely allowed families to stay together.Morris comments: “There was a totally fatuous claim that is made by Kirstjen Nielsen in the film: we’re just following the law – if you arrest a criminal and they have a child with him or her, you separate them.“There have been miserable policies towards immigrants from probably every administration, the first Bush on through to Donald Trump. But none of those administrations felt the need to do what he did. It was considered to be a step too far, a no-no, and yet they embraced it anyway.”He continues: “There are a lot of things that get to me but what really appalls me is that they would separate nursing infants from their mothers. This is clearly not right. What’s the word I’m searching for? This is wrong.”For Morris, the child separation saga pointed to a wider issue. “It’s an issue about racism and what I see as the racist rhetoric and policies of Donald Trump and his acolytes. I find it repulsive. I often like to remind people that racism is disgusting and it’s also bad manners. Haven’t we been taught not to act like that? Isn’t that part of the repertoire of being a civilised, cultured human being?“I hate analogies, but like everyone else, I can’t avoid using them. I like to tell people, as an American Jew, I always wondered what it was like to live in Germany in the 1930s, more specifically to be a Jew living in Germany in the 1930s. Now I know a lot more about what it must have been like.”Morris’s works include The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, American Dharma and My Psychedelic Love Story. Separated came with some distinct challenges. Much of the separation process happened away from TV cameras; the director compensations with dramatisations to portray a Guatemalan mother and son experiencing the border crossing, separation and reunification.View image in fullscreenIt was also hard to get interviews with those involved. Morris explains: “There are all kinds of impediments to getting people to talk; I’ve never seen anything this severe. If you’re working for the government, for example, like Jonathan White was working for the government, you’re constrained. You’re not allowed to talk without getting the permission of your superiors.“Most people who are still working in some capacity for the government simply would not talk and it didn’t matter how much begging and how much cajoling I might do. Jonathan would and that represents an extraordinary act of courage on his part.“He felt that the issues were so important that he had to talk. Call him a whistleblower. Call him whatever you want to call him. He did something that was incorrect and greatly appreciated by me. He took risks in order to tell a story which I believe needed to be told. A hero.”In his interview White describes Scott Lloyd, the head of the ORR, as “the most prolific child abuser in modern American history”, given White’s disturbing lack of awareness of the trauma inflicted on children under his care.Morris reflects: “Why is he doing the job? He’s a political appointee. He was known for his anti-abortion activism and that was his chief concern: preventing any of the women in ORR custody from ever getting abortions, even though at that time Roe was the law of the land.“Was Scott Lloyd interested very much in the care of people in his charge? I don’t know. It seems to me – I hate to make these inferences but I don’t hate them so much that I’m unwilling to make them – that he was currying favour with the administration. He was interested in self-advancement. He was ambitious and perfectly willing to do the bidding of the hardliners in the Trump administration.”Separated is also a study in the bureaucratic machinations behind how the sausage is made. “There is a very strong theme running through this about bureaucrats and bureaucracy, good bureaucrats and bad bureaucrats. Most interesting to me in the story is how pliable our morality is.“If we need to find a way to justify the most appalling behaviour, we somehow find a way to do it. You can listen to Kirstjen Nielsen braying like a donkey that she is just following the law – you wouldn’t want me to break the law, would you?“Well, I don’t look at it that way and, when it’s suggested that she might be separating families as a deterrent to immigration, she gets outraged. I can’t even believe you would suggest such a thing. This is all Looney Tunes. It’s people living in some strange nimbus of self-deception.”The film highlights the role of civil servants who challenged the policy and fought to reunite families – courageous individuals such as White and Jallyn Sualog who worked within the system to mitigate its harmful effects. And it offers a reminder of the mass street protests – plus worldwide condemnation from the pope and others – that ultimately compelled Trump to back down: the one significant policy reversal of his first term.Yet a scandal that has been called “torture”, and by Morris himself as leading to “state-created orphans”, gained relatively little attention during this year’s presidential election campaign. Democrats were on the defensive on the border issue and tried to avoid the subject.Morris says: “People were scared to talk about immigration. The Democrats were and the Republicans weren’t scared to talk about it as long as they could frame it in the most draconian, repulsive terms: we’ll deport everybody.”View image in fullscreenHe was denied a chance to help put the issue on the agenda when Separated was not scheduled for TV broadcast until after election day. Morris complained on the X social media platform: “Why is my movie not being shown on NBC prior to the election? It is not a partisan movie. It’s about a policy that was disgusting and should not be allowed to happen again. Make your own inferences.”Trump claimed that undocumented migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and asserted, without evidence, that Haitians were eating pet cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. He pledged the biggest mass deportation in US history and has already announced a team including the immigration hardliners Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, both of whom were instrumental in family separations during the first term.Will there be another public revolt this time or, given Trump’s victory in the national popular vote, are people demoralised and desensitised? Morris asks: “Did people in Germany all know that there was antisemitism? Well, yes. Did they know that they were involved in genocide? Probably not everybody.“On the part of the public, there’s a concept I’m very fond of: anti-curiosity. I sometimes say to myself, how much will it cost me to know less? There’s denial, there’s self-deception, there’s willful disbelief and on and on and on and on and on. I often say Homo sapiens: very bad and most certainly a compromised species.”But a mass deportation operation will be costly, logistically difficult and likely to produce harrowing images on TV that could reignite the anti-Trump resistance. At a recent screening of Separated in Washington, an audience member interrupted Soboroff and others on a panel discussion by shouting: “We’re not going to let him make our federal government the Third Reich of the US! We’re not going to let him make our National Guard people the Gestapo of the United States! We are not going to let that happen!”The sequel is always worse. Mass deportations would mean a return to child separations by another name. Some 4.4 million US citizen children lived with at least one undocumented parent as of 2018. The return of Trump has left Morris thinking about questions of justice.“What happens when you have crime without punishment?” he asks. “We all have this kind of quasi-religious model that moral transgressions have to be punished. There has to be some kind of societal reply. But what if there isn’t? What if crime goes unpunished?“I was just in Ukraine and I kept wondering – they’ve recorded over 100,000 war crimes by Russian soldiers – will these go unpunished? Will there ever be any kind of accountability? My answer to that is: ask America about crime without punishment and what ultimately that does to a society.”

      Separated will air on MSNBC in the US on 7 December More

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      Why Joe Biden pardoned his son – podcast

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      Joe Biden’s love for his family has long softened his public persona. From his grief at losing his first wife and daughter in a car crash, to the death of his son Beau, the tragedy he endured has been clear. And so has his obvious devotion to his second wife, Jill, and his remaining son, Hunter.It was in this light – as a doting father keen to protect his son – that the president hopes people will see his sudden decision to grant a pardon to Hunter for gun and federal tax offences. He was due to be sentenced this month. Hunter had become the first child of a sitting president to face a criminal trial and could have spent years in prison.Yet to many critics, Biden’s pardon is shocking. The president had repeatedly said he would not pardon his son, that he had faith in the institutions of justice, and he had positioned himself in his shortened election bid as someone who would uphold the rule of law. The Guardian’s US live editor, Chris Michael, explains why Biden may have changed his stance. And he tells Helen Pidd how the move could set a dangerous precedent on the cusp of Trump taking power. More

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      Trump picks Republican mega-donor Warren Stephens as ambassador to UK

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      Donald Trump announced on Monday he has picked investment banker and Republican mega-donor Warren Stephens to serve as ambassador to the UK.“Warren has always dreamed of serving the United States full time,” wrote Trump in a social media post. “I am thrilled that he will now have that opportunity as the top Diplomat, representing the U.S.A. to one of America’s most cherished and beloved Allies.”Stephens is chairman, president and CEO of Stephens Inc, a privately owned financial services firm headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, according to the firm’s website.The businessman has donated regularly to conservative causes, although not always in support of Trump. Stephens initially poured money into efforts to oppose Trump’s 2016 run, but he later supported Trump’s 2020 presidential run. In 2023, Stephens donated in support of Asa Hutchinson’s presidential run. In 2024, according to Federal Election Commission filings, he donated at least $2m to Make America Great Again Inc, a pro-Trump Super Pac.In his announcement, Trump called Stephens’s company a “wonderful financial services firm” and praised Stephens for “selflessly giving back to his community as a philanthropist”.A 2017 report by the Guardian revealed that Stephens held a 40% stake in a payday loan company, Integrity Advance, that the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) took action against in 2015 for allegedly employing predatory lending practices. The revelation was produced through the Paradise Papers reporting project, which investigated multinational companies’ use of tax havens to shelter their money.According to the 2015 CFPB report, Integrity Advance allegedly misled loan recipients by obscuring the total cost of the loans and requiring borrowers to pay back loans through pre-authorized electronic transfers.

      Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Raskin seeks to lead Democrats on House judiciary in ‘fight of our lives’ against Trump

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      Jamie Raskin, the Maryland congressman who spearheaded the second impeachment of Donald Trump, has announced a bid to unseat a veteran Democratic colleague from a key role in a Capitol Hill committee as part of a party drive to sharpen its opposition in preparation for Trump’s return to the White House.After days of speculation, Raskin said he would challenge Jerrold Nadler of New York for the post of ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives’ judiciary committee.The move signals Democratic conviction that the committee could become one of the most important Capitol Hill forums in which to combat Trump’s stated goal of installing loyalists at the justice department and FBI with the brief of purging supposedly disloyal officials and pursuing retribution against political enemies.The Republicans will control the House with a wafer thin majority – expected to be 220-215, with one race from last month’s election still to be officially called – when Congress returns in the new year, further raising the stakes of effective committee opposition.Raskin, currently the ranking Democrat on the House oversight committee, announced he was challenging 77-year-old Nadler, who he acknowledged as a friend, in an open letter.“We are in the fight of our lives. The stakes have gone way up since the election,” Raskin wrote. “House Democrats must stand in the breach to defend the principles and institutions of constitutional democracy. We dare not fail.”Explaining the key role of the judiciary committee, he added: “This is where we will wage our front-line defense of the freedoms and rights of the people, the integrity of the Department of Justice and the FBI, and the security of our most precious birthright possessions: the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the rule of law, and democracy itself.”Raskin, who played a leading role in the House investigation into the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, had been urged by colleagues to run amid doubts over Nadler’s ability to combat Trump’s agenda, as advanced by the committee’s pugnacious Republican chair, Jim Jordan.A former constitutional law professor, Raskin, 61, played the role of leading impeachment manager against Trump following the riot. The House impeached the then sitting president for his role in the episode. A Senate trial the following month failed to garner the two-thirds majority vote to convict that would have barred him from seeking office again.Nadler has been criticised by colleagues for a pedestrian speaking style that sticks to talking points, whereas Raskin is widely seen as more spontaneous and combative.The New York Times reported that Nadler had expressed anger to Raskin – who he previously supported to be the party’s leading figure on the oversight committee – at the prospect of a challenge.Among those having reportedly urged Raskin to mount a challenge has been Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, who continues to wield influence in the party’s congressional caucus.Nadler’s challenge is part of a broader attempt by Democrats to replace some of their most senior ranking figures with younger faces on key committees.Raúl Grijalva, 76, the ranking Democrat on the House natural resources committee, announced on Monday that he was withdrawing after being challenged for the position by Jared Huffman, 60, who has promoted himself as being able to “limit the damage from Trump’s Project 2025 agenda”. More

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      What is a presidential pardon and how has it been used in the US?

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      Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter on Sunday for any federal crimes “he committed or may have committed” between 1 January 2014 and 1 December 2024 has brought renewed focus on the expansive power the US constitution gives the president to grant official clemency.It’s a power that presidents have deployed since George Washington, who pardoned those involved in the Whiskey Rebellion, to Donald Trump, who pardoned his political allies.What is the pardon power?The presidential pardon power is explicitly outlined in the US constitution.Section 2 of article II says that the president has the power to “grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment”. The president’s power only applies to federal crimes, not state ones. It also does not apply to cases of impeachment.The founders took the pardon power from England, where there was a longstanding tradition of the king’s ability to issue mercy pardons. There was some debate about whether Congress should be required to give approval of pardons and whether there should be an exception for treason, but Alexander Hamilton pushed the constitutional convention to include a broad pardon power solely vested in the president. “As men generally derive confidence from their numbers, they might often encourage each other in an act of obduracy, and might be less sensible to the apprehension of suspicion or censure for an injudicious or affected clemency. On these accounts, one man appears to be a more eligible dispenser of the mercy of government, than a body of men,” he wrote in Federalist no 74, one of a series of essays to promote the ratification of the constitution.When it came to treason, he argued that the president could deploy the pardon power as a tool to negotiate and unify the country. “In seasons of insurrection or rebellion, there are often critical moments, when a welltimed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth; and which, if suffered to pass unimproved, it may never be possible afterwards to recall,” he wrote.Bernadette Meyler, a law professor at Stanford University who studies British and US law, described it as “the one emergency power written into the constitution, other than the suspension of habeas corpus.“It’s one thing that is a concession to the idea that there might be certain unforeseen circumstances that the president would have to intervene in,” she said. “It goes along with the president’s control also over the army and navy and military power because, in the context that it was being contemplated, it was really being thought about as another tool within the ability to control domestic unrest.” How has the pardon power been used?George Washington issued the first pardons in 1795 to two men who were involved in the Whiskey Rebellion, a violent uprising in Pennsylvania to protest a tax on whiskey and other alcohol products by the nascent federal government.A key moment in the pardon power came after the civil war, when president Andrew Johnson issued “a full pardon and amnesty” to any person “who, directly or indirectly, participated in the late insurrection or rebellion” during the civil war. This and similar pardons around the same time led the US supreme court to interpret the pardon power to allow the president to grant broad amnesty to a group of people and not just for specific crimes already committed, Meyler said.After Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in the 1970s after Watergate, Gerald Ford issued a full and unconditional pardon for any crimes.In 1977, Jimmy Carter issued a mass pardon for those who had dodged the draft for the Vietnam war. At the end of his term in 1992, George HW Bush pardoned six people involved in the Iran-Contra affair, including the former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger.In his last day in office in 2001, Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother and gave an extremely controversial pardon to Marc Rich, a fugitive convicted of financial crimes whose ex-wife had been a major donor to Democrats and the Clinton campaign. Barack Obama granted clemency to more than 1,700 people while in office, including hundreds who had been convicted of non-violent drug offenses.Who did Donald Trump pardon?Trump did not hesitate to use the pardon power during his presidency to help political allies. He pardoned Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law Jared. The elder Kushner had pleaded guilty years earlier to tax evasion and witness tampering (Trump has now tapped him to be ambassador to France).He pardoned his political adviser Steve Bannon, who faced charges of defrauding donors on a charity related to building a wall at the southern border. He also pardoned Paul Manafort, who served as a top official on his 2016 campaign, and Trump ally Roger Stone.Trump pardoned the former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik, the conservative personality Dinesh D’Souza, and Elliott Broidy, a major Republican donor. He also pardoned the rapper Lil Wayne and Alice Marie Johnson, a woman who had spent decades in prison for drug offenses but earned considerable attention after Kim Kardashian took on her cause.Trump has said he will issue a mass pardon for those involved in the January 6 attacks, a move that would end years of work by the justice department to investigate and criminally prosecute those involved in the attacks.Do other countries have a pardon power?The power to pardon is one that widely exists around the world, said Andrew Novak, a professor at George Mason University who is the author of Comparative Executive Clemency: The Constitutional Pardon Power and the Prerogative of Mercy in Global Perspective.But the United States is somewhat unique in allowing its chief executive the ability to pardon without having to get input or sign-off from others.“Biden can grant a pardon without input from anybody, which is much more of like a medieval English king conception of the pardon power, which is kind of ironic,” he added. “We have kind of an old-fashioned conception of the pardon power, at least generally.”“Having this unlimited pardon power that’s more similar to like 1700s England than it is to the current state of affairs in the western world,” he added. “In most countries in Europe, and the comparators in the developed world, they require input from someone else.” That requirement for input, Novak said, can somewhat limit a pardon being used to serve political or personal interests, the way it can be used in the US.Many countries also don’t allow for a pardon before conviction, Novak said, and there has been a movement over the last few decades in other countries for more transparency to ensure that proper processes are followed.About half of constitutions around the world limit the pardon power to something that can only occur after conviction, are only for specified offenses, or require an executive to consult others, Novak said. It’s uncommon for countries to have a ban on self-pardoning or pardoning a family member, he added.“Maybe it’s not common because the circumstance doesn’t arise very often,” he said. “The pardon power has always been a corruption risk going back to medieval times and can be used for many forms of self-dealing, like shielding one’s close associates or supporters.”The US founders understood impeachment to be an important check on the pardon power, Meyler said. “As we’ve seen it’s extremely hard to actually convict on an impeachment so that has proved to be really a fictional limitation on the president’s power.” More

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      Joe Biden criticized by some supporters for pardoning son Hunter: ‘Selfish move’

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      Joe Biden has been criticised by some of his own supporters for issuing a pardon to his son Hunter that he had previously sworn not to give.The president’s volte face drew predictable fire from Republicans, led by the president-elect, Donald Trump, who used it to raise the case of the jailed ringleaders of the 6 January 2021 assault on the US Capitol, who he has suggested he will pardon when he returns to the White House.“Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years?” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.Yet it was condemnation from fellow Democrats – some of whom said he had handed Trump justification for his own use of the presidential pardon power – that seemed likely to carry greater sting.Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, said Biden had risked his own reputation and legacy.“While as a father I certainly understand President @JoeBiden’s natural desire to help his son by pardoning him, I am disappointed that he put his family ahead of the country,” Polis posted on X.“This is a bad precedent that could be abused by later Presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation.“When you become President, your role is Pater familias of the nation. Hunter brought the legal trouble he faced on himself, and one can sympathize with his struggles while also acknowledging that no one is above the law, not a President and not a President’s son.”Hunter Biden was convicted by a court in Delaware last June of lying on a gun licence application at a time when he was addicted to cocaine. He was later convicted of separate tax evasion charges in a court in California.He was scheduled to be sentenced for both convictions in hearings this month.Biden justified his pardon by insisting that Hunter’s prosecutions had been driven by “raw politics” and would not have been pressed had his father not been president.That interpretation was rejected by Greg Stanton, a Democratic House member for Arizona.“I respect President Biden, but I think he got this one wrong,” he posted on social media.“This wasn’t a politically-motivated prosecution. Hunter committed felonies, and was convicted by a jury of his peers.”There was further condemnation from Michael Bennet, a Democratic senator for Colorado, who was prominent among those calling for Biden to step aside as the party’s presidential nominee last summer following a bad debate performance.“President Biden’s decision put personal interest ahead of duty and further erodes Americans’ faith that the justice system is fair and equal for all,” he wrote on X.Peter Welch, a Democratic senator for Vermont, said the pardon was “as the action of a loving father, understandable – but as the action of our nation’s Chief Executive, unwise”.In similar vein, Greg Landsman, a Democratic congressman for Ohio, posted: “As a father, I get it. But as someone who wants people to believe in public service again, it’s a setback.”Joe Walsh, an anti-Trump former Republican congressman who endorsed Biden for president, called the pardon deflating because it enabled Trump to validate his own much-criticised pardons of friends and supporters.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This just furthers the cynicism that people have about politics,” he told MSNBC. “That cynicism strengthens Trump because Trump can just say: ‘I’m not a unique threat. Everybody does this. If I do something for my kid, my son-in-law, look, Joe Biden does the same thing.’ I get it, but this was a selfish move by Biden which politically only strengthens Trump.”In the Atlantic magazine, Jonathan Chait argued that the president had undermined the democratic values that he had previously championed.“Principles become much harder to defend when their most famous defenders have compromised them flagrantly,” he wrote.“With the pardon decision, like his stubborn insistence on running for a second term he couldn’t win, Biden chose to prioritize his own feelings over the defense of his country.”Some Democrats leaped to Biden’s defence.“Hunter. Here’s the reality. No US [attorney] would have charged this case given the underlying facts,” Eric Holder, an attorney general under Barack Obama, wrote on X.“Had his name been Joe Smith the resolution would have been – fundamentally and more fairly – a declination. Pardon warranted.”Jasmine Crockett, a Texas member of the House of Representatives, went further, saying: “Let me be the first to congratulate the president.”“At the end of the day, we know that we have a 34-count convicted felon that is about to walk into the White House,” she told MSNBC, referring to Trump’s conviction by a New York court on document falsification charges relating to hush money paid to a porn actor.Alluding to allegations against several of Trump’s cabinet nominees, she added: “For anyone that wants to clutch their pearls now because [Biden] decided that he was going to pardon his son, I would say take a look in the mirror because we also know that … this cabinet has more people accused of sexual assault than any incoming cabinet probably in the history of America.”Sarah Longwell, another anti-Trump Republican strategist who endorsed Kamala Harris’s presidential bid, wrote: “‘Trump is worse’ is never a good argument to justify bad behavior.“Biden knows it’s wrong. That’s why he committed over and over to not doing it. It doesn’t make him the same as Trump. It doesn’t erase how singularly corrupt Trump’s current appointments are. It’s simply wrong and we should say so, lest we forget that right and wrong still exist and awareness of it matters in our President.” More

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      Trump uses Hunter Biden pardon to hint potential clemency for January 6 insurrectionists

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      Donald Trump seized on Hunter Biden’s pardon to drop one of his strongest hints yet that he intends to grant clemency to at least some of the instigators and participants of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by a mob trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat.“Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years? Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!” the US president-elect posted on his Truth Social platform.It was the latest in a series of supportive comments by Trump on behalf of those convicted for their part in the onslaught, which resulted in the deaths of five people at the time. Additionally, four police officers involved in trying to beat back the rioters killed themselves in the days and months after the attack.Now the granting of a pardon by the sitting president, Joe Biden, to his son appears to have been taken by Trump as a fresh justification.The 2021 assault spawned one of the biggest criminal investigations in US history, resulting in federal charges being filed against nearly 1,500 people. About 1,000 have either been found guilty or pleaded guilty.The investigation is ongoing. The FBI said last month it was seeking nine people in connection with violent assaults on police officers on the day.Despite the seriousness of the offences, Trump has been publicly itching for months to act on behalf of those imprisoned, whom he has labelled “hostages” and “political prisoners”.In March, he wrote that one of his first acts in office, if re-elected, would be to “Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned!”He has repeated the vow several times, including in an appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists in July, when asked if he would grant a pardon.“Oh, absolutely, I would. If they’re innocent, I would pardon them,” he said.But he has stopped short of promising a blanket pardon. “I can’t say for every single one, because a couple of them, probably they got out of control,” he told CNN.Some of those convicted and given the longest sentences did not take part in the violence inside the Capitol but were convicted of seditious conspiracy and other charges connected with organising the attack. They include Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia group, and Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys, which has been described as a neo-fascist organisation that promotes political violence.Whatever distinctions Trump and his campaign team have in mind, there is little question that hopes are high among many of those in custody that a pardon could be forthcoming.Lawyers for Joe Biggs, a Proud Boys member given a 17-year prison sentence last year after being convicted of a spate of crimes including seditious conspiracy and intimidation or threats to prevent officers from discharging their duties, have said they would be requesting a pardon.Biggs claimed at his trial that he was following Trump’s orders.Lawyers for several of those convicted have unsuccessfully sought to delay sentencing hearings since Trump won last month’s presidential election, on the basis that clemency might be at hand.Among those incarcerated, at least one has little doubt about the prospects of imminent freedom.Jake Lang, who is charged with several offences, including charging police officers, posted in celebratory fashion on social media after Trump’s election win, the BBC reported.“COMING HOME!!!!,” he wrote. “THE JANUARY 6 POLITICAL PRISONERS ARE FINALLY COMING HOME!!!!” More

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      Pete Hegseth forced out of non-profit leadership roles for misconduct – report

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      President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, was reportedly forced out of two leadership roles at veteran-focused non-profits amid allegations of financial mismanagement, drunkenness and sexist behavior.A lengthy account in the New Yorker, based on interviews with whistleblowers, described Hegseth’s behavior at two organizations where he held leadership positions: the Koch-backed group Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) and the “AstroTurf” billionaire-backed Vets for Freedom (VFF).A whistleblower report accused Hegseth, who was CEO, of appearing frequently drunk at CVA social events, fostering a hostile work environment for female staffers and spending non-profit funds on personal expenses.The news follows allegations of sexual assault in 2017, controversy over Hegseth’s criticism of women serving in combat roles in the military and an email from Hegseth’s mother in which she told him about his mistreatment of women: “get some help and take an honest look at yourself.”Hegseth’s mother, Penelope, later disavowed the email, said she had written it in anger and called it “disgusting” to publish its contents. Trump’s transition team has said the sexual assault allegations were found to be “false”, a statement contradicted by local police reports.The Department of Defense is one of the nation’s largest employers, with roughly 3 million military and civilian employees and had a budget of $820bn in 2023.“I’ve seen him drunk so many times. I’ve seen him dragged away not a few times but multiple times. To have him at the Pentagon would be scary,” a former staffer told the magazine.In one instance described in the whistleblower report, Hegseth reportedly took CVA staffers to a Louisiana strip club and then got so drunk he attempted to get on stage with the strippers.The senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut who serves on the Senate armed services committee, told the New Yorker: “Much as we might be sympathetic to people with continuing alcohol problems, they shouldn’t be at the top of our national-security structure.” Hegseth needs Senate confirmation, if he is to take up the cabinet-level position.At VFF, a former associate told the magazine that Hegseth had effectively run it into the ground, spending in a way that nearly forced the organization into bankruptcy. The findings of a forensic accountant hired by the organization’s donors were described as “appalling”, and one former staffer described parties that, “could politely be called trysts”.Eventually, VFF merged with another non-profit in a way that removed Hegseth’s leadership power. Hegseth worked at VFF from roughly 2007-2012, and at CVA from 2014-2016.The allegations come after Trump has stood by Hegseth following an investigation into sexual assault allegations by Monterey, California, police in 2017. In that incident, Hegseth was accused of assaulting a woman after a Republican women’s event.Investigators recommended the complaint be forwarded to prosecutors for review. Hegseth paid a confidential settlement to the woman involved in the alleged incident in 2023 to head off the threat of a lawsuit.At the time, a spokesperson for Trump’s transition team said: the “report corroborates what Mr Hegseth’s attorneys have said all along: the incident was fully investigated and no charges were filed because police found the allegations to be false”. More