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      Donald Trump’s legal team pushes for hush-money case to be dismissed – US politics live

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      The Trump transition team said it has entered a memorandum of understanding with the US Department of Justice.“This is the next step in the ongoing preparation of senior administration officials for the purpose of serving in President Trump’s administration,” the statement said. “This allows the transition team to submit names for background checks and security clearances.”The brief statement didn’t make clear whether the transition has given up on delaying or privatizing background checks for its cabinet nominees.Earlier, those familiar with the tram’s plans had indicated that Trump’s appointees would skirt full FBI vetting and delay receiving classified briefings until after Trump was sworn in.Trump’s lawyers had noted that the US justice department was poised to abandon Trump’s federal cases and referred to a departmental memo that bars prosecution of sitting presidents.“As in those cases, dismissal is necessary here,” their filing argued. “Just as a sitting president is completely immune from any criminal process, so too is President Trump as president-elect.”Special counsel prosecutors who were pursuing the federal cases against Trump indeed filed paperwork on 25 November asking for their dismissal – citing justice department policy that his team has repeatedly invoked.“It has long been the position of the Department of Justice that the United States constitution forbids the federal indictment and subsequent criminal prosecution of a sitting president,” wrote Molly Gaston, the top deputy for special counsel Jack Smith.“That prohibition is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the government stands fully behind.”Manhattan prosecutors have argued against dismissal in prior court papers and have suggested a solution that would obviate any concerns about interrupting his presidency – including “deferral of all remaining criminal proceedings until after the end of defendant’s upcoming presidential term”.The dismissal pitch came after Judge Juan Merchan’s decision on 22 November to indefinitely postpone the president-elect’s sentencing so lawyers on both sides can argue over its future, given Trump’s victory in the recent presidential election.While Trump’s lawyers have repeatedly pushed for dismissal to no avail, his impending return to the presidency has presented an opportunity for them to make their case once again.Merchan said in his postponement decision that Trump’s lawyers had a 2 December deadline to file their argument for dismissal. Prosecutors had a week to submit their response.Trump’s lawyers have been calling on Merchan to toss the case outright after he defeated Kamala Harris on 5 November. In previous papers seeking permission to file a formal dismissal request, Trump’s attorneys said that dismissal was required “in order to facilitate the orderly transition of executive power”.Todd Blanche, Trump’s main attorney and selection for deputy US attorney general, as well as Emil Bove, his choice for principal associate deputy attorney general, said that Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office “appears to not yet be ready to dismiss this politically motivated and fatally flawed case, which is what is mandated by the law and will happen as justice takes its course”.Donald Trump’s lawyers have asked a New York state judge to dismiss the criminal case against him, in which he was convicted of 34 felony counts involving hush money.Trump’s lawyers have argued that sentencing in the case would cause “unconstitutional impediments” to Trump’s ability to govern.The lawyers also cited Joe Biden’s sweeping pardon of his son Hunter Biden in their argument. The filing reads:
      Yesterday, in issuing a 10-year pardon to Hunter Biden that covers any and all crimes whether charged or uncharged, President Biden asserted that his son was ‘selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,’ and ‘treated differently.’
      President Biden argued that ‘raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.’ These comments amounted to an extraordinary condemnation of President Biden’s own DOJ.
      Already, Judge Juan Merchan has indefinitely postponed Trump’s sentencing.The Trump transition team said it has entered a memorandum of understanding with the US Department of Justice.“This is the next step in the ongoing preparation of senior administration officials for the purpose of serving in President Trump’s administration,” the statement said. “This allows the transition team to submit names for background checks and security clearances.”The brief statement didn’t make clear whether the transition has given up on delaying or privatizing background checks for its cabinet nominees.Earlier, those familiar with the tram’s plans had indicated that Trump’s appointees would skirt full FBI vetting and delay receiving classified briefings until after Trump was sworn in.Pete Hegseth, whom Donald Trump named as his pick to lead the defense department, had multiple affairs while married to his first wife, Vanity Fair reports.Such behavior could have violated military rules governing Hegseth, who served in the army national guard, and also strike another blow to his reputation as Republican senators consider whether he should lead the Pentagon. Other media outlets in recent days have reported on an accusation of sexual assault against Hegseth, which he denies, as well as claims that he abuses alcohol, mismanaged finances at two charities he was involved in and created a hostile environment for women.Here’s more, from Vanity Fair’s story:
      Hegseth and Schwarz’s young marriage was short-lived. In December 2008, Schwarz filed for divorce after Hegseth admitted that he cheated on her, according to four sources close to the couple. (APM Reports previously revealed that the infidelity was listed as grounds in the couple’s divorce proceedings.) The sources told me that Hegseth’s infidelity left Schwarz emotionally and psychologically scarred. ‘She was gaslighted by him heavily throughout their relationship,’ one of the sources told me. ‘As far as everyone else was concerned, they were viewed by many as this all-American power couple that were making big things for themselves.’ (Schwarz declined to comment. Hegseth’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this story, and instead provided a statement that impugned my record as a reporter.)
      At the time Schwarz filed for divorce, Hegseth was dating Samantha Deering, whom he met while working in Washington, DC, at Vets for Freedom, a group that lobbied to maintain the military’s “counterinsurgency” strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2010, Hegseth married Deering, with whom he has three kids. In 2017, Deering filed for divorce after Hegseth fathered a child with his Fox News producer Jennifer Rauchet. Hegseth and Rauchet married in 2019 at Trump’s golf course in Colts Neck, New Jersey.
      Speaking of Kamala Harris, the Atlantic published a lengthy interview with four top players in the vice-president’s failed campaign for the White House, in which they discuss what went wrong.The general conclusion of the piece is that it would have been difficult for any Democrat to win, given how unhappy much of the United States was with Joe Biden’s leadership. But the president’s decision to end his bid for a second term just over three months before election day made it unlikely that Harris would be able to turn the situation around – and indeed, she was not able to.It also underscores that Democrats have work to do to win back voting blocs that once supported the party but appear to be defecting in increasing numbers to the GOP.From the piece:
      In a race shaped so profoundly by fundamental forces of disaffection with the country’s direction, could anything have changed the outcome? As the Democratic strategist Mike Podhorzer has argued, more voters might have ranked their hesitations about Trump higher if the Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court had not blocked any chance that the former president would face a criminal trial before this election on the charges that he tried to subvert the previous one. Plouffe pointed to another what-if potentially big enough to have changed the result: Biden’s withdrawal from the race much earlier rather than only after his disastrous debate performance in June. If Biden had dropped out last winter, Plouffe argued to me, Democrats could have held a full-fledged primary that would have either produced a nominee more distant from his administration or strengthened Harris by requiring her to establish her independence. Looking back at what contributed to Trump’s victory, Plouffe said pointedly, Biden’s choice not to step aside sooner was ‘the cardinal sin.’
      Even so, Plouffe acknowledged, ‘I’m not sure, given the headwinds, any Democrat could have won.’ For all the difficulties that the atmosphere created for Harris, the election unquestionably raised warning signs for Democrats that extend beyond dissatisfaction with current conditions. It continued an erosion that is ominous for the party in its support among working-class nonwhite voters, particularly Latino men. And as Flaherty, the deputy campaign manager, told me, the Republican Party’s win powerfully demonstrated that it – or at least Trump himself – has built more effective mechanisms for communicating with infrequent voters, especially young men who don’t consume much conventional political news.
      Something Donald Trump might do once he takes office is pardon people convicted over the January 6 insurrection.Despite that, the justice department is continuing those prosecutions, and just announced that Matthew Brent Carver of Kentucky had pleaded guilty to a charge of “felony offense of obstruction of law enforcement during a civil disorder” in the attack that occurred nearly four years ago. Here’s what the department says Carver did:
      Around approximately 2:45 pm, law enforcement officers, including members of the U.S. Capitol Police and D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD)—who were performing their official duties at the Capitol on January 6—gathered and formed a police line towards the southern end of the Upper West Terrace. Several minutes later, around 2:47 pm, these officers moved in tandem towards the northern end of the Upper West Terrace in an effort to clear and secure the Upper West Terrace.
      As the officers advanced, they ordered protesters to “Move Back! Move Back!” while they attempted to secure the Upper West Terrace. Around 2:48 pm, as the police line approached the northern end of the Upper West Terrace, Carver emerged from the crowd, assumed an aggressive stance towards the approaching officers, and yelled, “Come on! Bring it!”
      Seconds later, Carver approached an MPD officer, grabbed the officer’s baton, and attempted to pull the baton away from the officer and, in doing so, also pulled the officer out of the police line and into the crowd of rioters. Carver was then pulled back into the crowd. Shortly afterward, the police line reformed and continued to push the protesters out of the Upper West Terrace, and Carver eventually made his way out of restricted permitter.
      The FBI arrested Carver on Jan. 30, 2024, in Kentucky.
      And a look at how many people have faced charges over the attack:
      In the 46 months since Jan. 6, 2021, more than 1,561 individuals have been charged in nearly all 50 states for crimes related to the breach of the U.S. Capitol, including more than 590 individuals charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement, a felony. The investigation remains ongoing.
      Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and other top Democrats spent the past four years arguing to voters, unsuccessfully, that Donald Trump represents a unique threat to democracy and must never be put in power again.Speaking to Newsmax, Trump adviser Jason Miller turned their rhetoric on its head, by arguing that the incoming president will be good for democracy worldwide:
      Democracy is going to be in such better standing around the world, because you have to have a strong American presidency if you want to have strong democracy around the world, where you see peace in the Middle East, where you get the Russia-Ukraine conflict resolved. And finally, we’re going to get back to where we have peace and prosperity … for everybody.
      Speaking to the conservative Newsmax network, top Donald Trump adviser Jason Miller said that the incoming president will take aggressive actions over his first 100 days in office, including cracking down on migrants and spurring more oil and gas drilling.“President Trump is … moving really fast here. I mean, even by Thanksgiving, he had his entire cabinet picked,” Miller said. He said several top advisers including incoming White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and “border czar” Tom Homan “are putting together the executive orders and the policies. As President Trump said, we’re going to drill, baby, drill and secure the border – those will be day one priorities.”Miller continued:
      This first 100 days is going to be nonstop. There’s so many things that he’s ready to do. Because, again, we’ve never had a second-term president step in that is ready to go. In fact, we’ve never had a first-term president, never had president in history who’s so ready to go on day one, who knows exactly what they want to do. So, if you voted for President Trump, [you] should be pretty enthused that we’re gonna have the country back on track.
      As he wrapped up his speech on the outskirts of Angola’s capital, Luanda, a reporter asked Joe Biden for his comment on the declaration of martial law in South Korea.“I’m just getting briefed on it,” Biden replied.A spokesperson for the national security council said earlier that they were “seriously concerned” by the declaration, but Biden has not yet commented.As South Korea’s surprise martial law announcement sends shock waves across the country and beyond, another war abroad is also commanding the US’s attention, the Guardian’s Andrew Roth reports. Joe Biden is scrambling to “put Ukrainian forces in the strongest possible position” before Donald Trump, who has threatened to cut off all aid to Ukraine, assumes the highest level of office in the nation.The Biden administration is rushing military equipment to Ukraine in a last-ditch effort to shore up the country’s defenses against the Russian invasion before Donald Trump assumes the US presidency in January.The newly announced $725m in assistance will include Stinger anti-air missiles, anti-drone weapons, artillery shells and long-range Himars rocket munitions, and anti-armour missiles, as well as spare parts and other assistance to repair damaged equipment from US stocks, the state department said.The new shipments of weapons come as Ukraine is desperately seeking to stabilise its frontlines in both the east of the country, where Russia has made grinding progress toward the crucial logistics town of Pokrovsk, as well in the Kursk region of Russia, where Ukrainian forces are bracing themselves for an assault by Russian and North Korean troops.South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, declared martial law today, and accused the country’s main opposition party of being anti-state, North Korea sympathizers.A spokesperson for the US national security council told CNN that the US was not given a warning from the South Korean president before he declared martial law.“We are seriously concerned by the developments we are seeing on the ground in the ROK [Republic of Korea].”The US state department’s principal deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel said in a press conference today: “We are watching the recent developments in the ROK with grave concern. We are seeking to engage with our Republic of Korea counterparts at every level … This is an incredibly fluid situation.”You can read more about this development on our South Korea blog here.Donald Trump has reportedly offered the job of deputy secretary of defense to a billionaire investor whose firm has taken stakes in companies that do business with the Pentagon. Should Stephen Feinberg accept the nomination, it will be the latest to stir controversy, particularly among Democrats concerned that his nominees lack experience, have conflicts of interest or will pursue dangerous policies. Meanwhile, the fallout from Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter Biden continues. A Delaware federal judge cited the pardon in ending Hunter Biden’s prosecution on charges related to lying to buy a gun, while a top Trump adviser refused to say if the incoming president would opt to pardon himself of recently dismissed charges over allegedly hiding classified documents and plotting to overturn the 2020 election.Here’s what else has happened today:

      Chuck Schumer will continue to lead Democrats in the Senate after a close-door election by his colleagues. He will be the minority leader starting next year, when Republicans take control of the chamber.

      Traveling in Angola, Biden was asked about his decision to pardon his son. He refused to answer, and has not said anything else about the decision since making it public on Sunday evening.

      Democrats who might seek the presidency in 2028 did not want to share with Politico their views on Hunter Biden’s pardon. Party officials seeking to lead the Democratic National Committee were more talkative.
      Donald Trump has offered the post of deputy secretary of defense to Stephen Feinberg, the billionaire co-founder and CEO of investment firm Cerberus Capital Management, which has stakes in companies that do business with the military, the Washington Post reports.It is not clear if Feinberg accepted the job, the Post reports, and Trump has not yet publicly announced the nomination.Cerberus this year disclosed an investment in M1 Support Services, which provides military aircraft training and maintenance services. In 2018, Cerberus took a majority stake in Navistar Defense, which manufactures military vehicles.Defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth will be back on Capitol Hill today, meeting with Republican senators who will consider his appointment.Politico reports that he is scheduled to meet Eric Schmitt of Missouri, Ted Budd of North Carolina and James Risch of Idaho. Hegseth will also probably run into plenty of reporters who will be asking about his drinking, treatment of women and financial management of two veterans non-profits he reportedly was forced out of.A judge has ordered an end to Hunter Biden’s prosecution on charges of lying about his drug use when buying a gun, after Joe Biden pardoned him on Sunday.Delaware federal judge Maryellen Noreika terminated the case against Hunter Biden in a decision issued today, after a jury found him guilty of three gun-related charges earlier this year. Biden was also pardoned of tax fraud charges leveled against him in California, which he pleaded guilty to. He was awaiting sentencing in both cases before the controversial presidential pardon.Here’s more about the gun case: More

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      in US Politics

      Trump lawyers file papers to request dismissal of hush-money case

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      Donald Trump’s lawyers have filed paperwork pushing for dismissal of his Manhattan criminal hush-money case.The dismissal pitch came after Judge Juan Merchan’s decision on 22 November to indefinitely postpone the president-elect’s sentencing so lawyers on both sides can argue over its future, given Trump’s victory in the recent presidential election.While Trump’s lawyers have repeatedly pushed for dismissal to no avail, his impending return to the presidency has presented an opportunity for them to make their case once again.Merchan said in his postponement decision that Trump’s lawyers had a 2 December deadline to file their argument for dismissal. Prosecutors had a week to submit their response.Trump’s lawyers have been calling on Merchan to toss the case outright after he defeated Kamala Harris on 5 November. In previous papers seeking permission to file a formal dismissal request, Trump’s attorneys said that dismissal was required “in order to facilitate the orderly transition of executive power”.Todd Blanche, Trump’s main attorney and selection for deputy US attorney general, as well as Emil Bove, his choice for principal associate deputy attorney general, said that Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office “appears to not yet be ready to dismiss this politically motivated and fatally flawed case, which is what is mandated by the law and will happen as justice takes its course”.They had noted that the US justice department was poised to abandon Trump’s federal cases and referred to a departmental memo that bars prosecution of sitting presidents.“As in those cases, dismissal is necessary here,” their filing argued. “Just as a sitting president is completely immune from any criminal process, so too is President Trump as president-elect.”Special counsel prosecutors who were pursuing the federal cases against Trump indeed filed paperwork on 25 November asking for their dismissal – citing justice department policy that his team has repeatedly invoked.“It has long been the position of the Department of Justice that the United States constitution forbids the federal indictment and subsequent criminal prosecution of a sitting president,” wrote Molly Gaston, the top deputy for special counsel Jack Smith.“That prohibition is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the government stands fully behind.”Manhattan prosecutors have argued against dismissal in prior court papers and have suggested a solution that would obviate any concerns about interrupting his presidency – including “deferral of all remaining criminal proceedings until after the end of defendant’s upcoming presidential term”. More

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      in US Politics

      Mark Zuckerberg seeks ‘active role’ in Trump tech policy

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      Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump, who have previously engaged in bitter public feuds, are now warming to each other as Zuckerberg seeks to influence tech policy in the incoming administration.The Meta CEO dined at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida last week, talking technology and demonstrating the company’s camera-equipped sunglasses, Fox News reported.“Mark Zuckerberg has been very clear about his desire to be a supporter of and a participant in this change that we’re seeing all around America,” Stephen Miller, a top Trump deputy, told Fox.Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, agreed with Miller. Clegg said in a recent press call that Zuckerberg wanted to play an “active role” in the administration’s tech policy decisions and wanted to participate in “the debate that any administration needs to have about maintaining America’s leadership in the technological sphere,” particularly on artificial intelligence. Meta declined to provide further comment.The weeks since the election have seen something of a give-and-take developing between Trump and Zuckerberg, who previously banned the president-elect from Instagram and Facebook for using the platforms to incite political violence on 6 January 2021. In a move that appears in deference to Trump – who has long accused Meta of censoring conservative views – the company now says its content moderation has at times been too heavy-handed.Clegg said hindsight showed that Meta “overdid it a bit” in removing content during the Covid-19 pandemic, which Zuckerberg recently blamed on pressure from the Biden administration.“We know that when enforcing our policies, our error rates are still too high, which gets in the way of the free expression that we set out to enable,” Clegg said during the press call. “Too often, harmless content gets taken down, or restricted, and too many people get penalized unfairly.”Meta and Zuckerberg personally have shown other signs of softening towards Trump. The company lifted its ban on Trump ahead of the election, and Zuckerberg called the president-elect a “badass” for defiantly pumping a fist after being shot in July.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionZuckerberg was also among the tech leaders quick to publicly congratulate Trump following the November election – and seemed to anticipate years of collaboration ahead.“We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country,” he said in a 6 November post on Threads. “Looking forward to working with you and your administration.” More

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      Trudeau meets rivals as he seeks united front in face of Trump tariff threat

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      Canada’s federal government has redoubled its efforts to ward off potentially disastrous tariffs from its closest ally, but provincial leaders have hinted at divergent strategies in response to the protectionist threat from president-elect Donald Trump.Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, convened a rare, in-person meeting with his political rivals on Tuesday to brief them on a surprise meeting with Trump at his Florida resort over the weekend.The gathering in Ottawa was attended by Trudeau’s one-time ally Jagmeet Singh of the New Democratic party and Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader and Trudeau antagonist vying to become prime minister in the coming months.Last week, Trump threatened in a social media post to apply devastating levies of 25% on all goods and services from both Mexico and Canada, vowing to keep them in place until “such time as drugs, in particular fentanyl, and all illegal aliens stop this invasion of our country!”Most of Canada’s provinces share a land border with the United States and roughly 75% of the country’s exports are bound for American markets.That figure varies wildly when it comes to provincial economies. The Atlantic provinces send as little as 20% down to their southern counterparts. Alberta, on the other hand, sends nearly 90% of its exports to the US, the vast majority of which are oil.If Ontario were a country, it would be the US’s third-largest trading partner.The province’s premier, Doug Ford, has appealed to a shared history with his American neighbours – and nearly C$500bn of annual trade – in a 60-second ad which will run in the US market including on Fox News and during National Football League games with millions of viewers.Ford also repeated warnings that the measure would rebound on US consumers, telling local media: “1,000% it’s gonna hurt the US. Nine thousand Americans wake up every single morning to build products and parts for Ontario, and customers in Ontario … My message to [Trump] is: Why? Why attack your closest friend, your closest ally?”As much as 85% of Ontario’s exports are sent south, with the vast majority related to the automotive industry.But in British Columbia, where less of its economy is tied to the US, the premier, David Eby, has pledged to search out other export markets.Roughly half of the province’s exports, including softwood lumber and metallurgical coal, from BC is bound to the US, according to provincial trade figures.“We’re going to continue to do our work to expand those trading opportunities,” Eby told reporters, a nod to the growing lure of overseas markets for a province on the Pacific Ocean.Given Trump’s previous follow-through on tariff threats, his latest warning prompted a scramble in Ottawa, with Trudeau securing a meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, becoming the first G7 leader to meet the president-elect since the US election.The meeting, attended by key advisers from both camps, was described as a “very productive meeting” by Trump. Trudeau, who flew to Florida with the aim of dissuading the president from imposing tariffs, described the meeting as “excellent conversation” – but left without any assurances.Without that promise, experts say Canada will need a unified voice to lobby elected officials in the US.“Coordinating Canadian leaders to conduct extensive outreach in the US – which worked well during Trump’s first term – will be harder this time, because an election is looming in Canada, because Trudeau is behind in the polls,” said Roland Paris, a former foreign policy adviser to Trudeau and director of the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.“Discord at home makes this advocacy campaign tougher, but that’s the situation that we face now. It’s a different moment in the political life cycle of this government.Poilievre has spent the last week suggesting the prime minister was caught off-guard by Trump’s win in November, despite assurances from federal officials that contingency plans for a Trump or Kamala Harris win were in place.The Conservative leader also criticized Trudeau’s emergency meeting with provincial premiers last week. “Justin Trudeau’s plan to save the economy? A Zoom call!” he posted on social media.Paris cautioned too much against playing domestic politics with a sensitive trade relationship.“Party leader leaders in Canada are going to have to be careful, because if they’re perceived to be working against the national interest in pursuit of their partisan objectives, then that could blow up in their faces too.” More

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      2,000 Mules director apologizes to man falsely accused of voter fraud in film

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      Conservative film-maker Dinesh D’Souza has issued a rare apology for his controversial documentary 2,000 Mules, a cornerstone of post-2020 election fraud conspiracy theories, but a prominent organization in the election denialism ecosystem is standing behind the film’s false claims.The film alleged a massive voter fraud scheme involving individuals supposedly stuffing ballot drop boxes with illegal votes. Central to these claims was cellphone geolocation data provided by True the Vote, a Texas-based non-profit that has become a prominent actor in the election denial ecosystem.True the Vote on Monday maintained that the film’s central premise “remains accurate”. The group insists its geolocation data proves suspicious voting patterns, despite repeated debunking by election experts, including the former attorney general William Barr.In a statement from last week, D’Souza acknowledges the video was mischaracterized.“I now understand that the surveillance videos used in the film were characterized on the basis of inaccurate information provided to me and my team,” D’Souza’s said in the statement. “If I had known then that the videos were not linked to geolocation data, I would have clarified this and produced and edited the film differently.”D’Souza’s public admission focuses on Mark Andrews, a Georgia voter featured in the film at a ballot drop box. Despite blurring Andrews’ face, the documentary suggested he was part of a coordinated voter fraud operation.D’Souza said he was apologizing to Andrews “because it is the right thing to do”, and “not under the terms of a settlement agreement or other duress”. Andrews sued D’Souza, True the Vote and the film’s distributor, Salem Media Group, for defamation in 2022 over the film. Salem settled the lawsuit earlier this year, agreed to stop distributing the film and apologized to Andrews. The lawsuit against D’Souza and True the Vote in federal court in Georgia is ongoing. Motions for summary judgment, which could make public details of how the film was made, are due to be filed on 12 December.The cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, a Department of Homeland Security agency which has dominion over elections in the United States, declined a request for comment.The concession from D’Souza marks the latest example of a prominent vector of misinformation about the 2020 election acknowledging their claims were false. Amid a separate defamation lawsuit, the Gateway Pundit, the influential far-right news outlet, acknowledged earlier this year that it had falsely accused Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Atlanta election workers, of fraud.OAN, another network that spread false claims about the election, also apologized to the two election workers. Freeman and Moss won a $148m judgment in a libel suit against Rudy Giuliani last year and are moving to seize his assets.Founded by Catherine Engelbrecht, True the Vote has transformed from a fringe organization into a key player in challenging election results. The group claims to protect elections through technological surveillance, but has repeatedly failed to substantiate its expansive fraud allegations.It’s not the first time the organization’s credibility has been undermined in recent memory. An app developed by True the Vote contained a security flaw that exposed user email addresses ahead of the US election, and the group is facing an IRS complaint for potentially illegal political coordination with the Georgia Republican party in 2020.The documentary’s impact extended far beyond the fringes of the internet. Months after the film premiered at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, armed individuals were documented stalking voters at drop boxes in Arizona, an illustration of how such conspiracy theories can translate into real-world intimidation.Salem Media Group – which originally distributed the film – has already ceased its circulation and issued its own apology to Andrews. Lawyers for Andrews declined to comment.Another incident that inspired the film was a video recording made of a woman, Guillermina Fuentes, collecting her ballot from her neighbor in San Luis, Arizona, a largely Hispanic town on the US-Mexico border. Fuentes was prosecuted and sentenced to 30 days in jail and her neighbor was sentenced to a year of probation. Luis Marquez, a community activist, said he was glad to hear of an apology, but the damage may have already been done. “It really made people not vote,” he said. “It made people afraid.” More

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      Can we keep the Elon Musks of the world out of British politics? Only if we act now | Oliver Bullough

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      It is an inevitable consequence of the inequality inherent to the “special relationship” that, as soon as someone wins the election in the US, the British government has to swallow its objections to anything they do. Donald Trump may have been “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath” six years ago, but it’s 2024 now and the once and future president has become “a very gracious host” with a soft spot for the royal family. Tech billionaire Elon Musk might compare Keir Starmer’s Britain to Stalin’s Russia but, as long as he’s Trump’s new best friend, “he’s far too important to ignore”.This kind of toadying must be as embarrassing for the politicians doing it as it is for those of us watching it, but it is at least understandable. Being friends with the US is not just the foundation of our national security policy, it’s pretty much the whole thing.What is not understandable is successive governments’ failure to learn from the US experience, and to act to prevent our own democracy from being drowned in dark money. British politicians will no doubt say that overhauling regulations around political donations isn’t a priority, that they’re focused on delivering policies that will improve ordinary people’s lives instead.But reports now suggest Musk is considering giving $100m to Reform UK as what has been described as a “f*** you Starmer payment” that would in effect install Nigel Farage as leader of the opposition. The Guardian reported on Monday that Labour might consider closing some of the loopholes that make such a wild suggestion possible – but only in the second half of this parliament, which can only mean the government has failed to understand how urgent this is.For any US billionaire, let alone the richest man in the world, spending on British politics would be like the owner of a Premier League club deciding to invest at the bottom end of the football pyramid: he could buy not only an awful lot of players, but in short order he’d probably own the whole competition.Total spending on the US presidential and congressional elections this year topped $15bn. In Pennsylvania alone, the two main parties spent almost $600m on advertising, so Musk’s $100m wouldn’t make much difference. In Britain, on the other hand, it would be transformational. The Electoral Commission is yet to publish its report on 2024’s general election, but it is unlikely that any of our parties spent much more than that – on central costs, candidate costs and staff costs – in the whole country over the whole year.A pressing need, therefore, is to limit how much political parties can spend. We do already have restrictions, which were introduced after the 1990s “cash for questions” scandal. But, under Boris Johnson, the Tories increased the limits by almost half to a combined total of about £75.9m on the central party and its candidates. The increase was transparently intended to help the Conservative party since, in the 2019 election, no other party came close to raising enough money to reach the previous threshold.The government must reduce the limit back to its old level. As with a football league, healthy competition and financial propriety suffer when one or two participants can vastly outspend the others, and the stakes are far higher in democracy than they are in sport.If politicians are constantly battling to raise more money than each other, then they will be focused on raising funds for themselves rather than on solving the problems of everyone else. They will also, inevitably, be tempted to offer their donors concessions in exchange for that money. It is in the interests of everyone – apart, of course, from the big donors – to stop that from happening.We also need to reduce the amount that any individual can give. If one man can give £5m to a political party, it inevitably undermines trust. Wealthy people may be different, but few ordinary voters would give away that kind of cash without expecting something in return. In an excellent analysis of the past two decades of political giving published this week, Transparency International suggests a yearly donation cap to any one party of £10,000, while the Labour-aligned thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research apparently intends to recommend a higher limit ofAlthough these changes might stop Musk from throwing his $100m molotov cocktail into the House of Commons, it would not stop him – or other ill-intentioned foreign billionaires – from giving money at all, and this is where I think we need to be radical.The US culture of massive electoral spending has deep roots, but the problem was super-sized in 2010 when the supreme court ruled that corporations have the right to free speech, that spending is a form of speech, and therefore that stopping companies from making donations was unconstitutional. The result was a huge increase in donations to groups supposedly independent of political candidates, but in practice closely aligned with them.In the UK, only individuals registered to vote can donate money to political parties, but this restriction (along with others) can be avoided by making donations via a British-registered company, partnership or “unincorporated association”, an obscure kind of structure that can allow you to disguise who you are.Many observers have proposed complicated arrangements to plug these loopholes, but rich people have lawyers to circumvent complicated arrangements, so I would just ban corporate giving altogether. Companies are not people. They can’t vote, and I see no reason why they should be able to fund political campaigns either. Our democracy belongs to the voters, to no one else, and we need to keep it that way.The final step to plutocrat-proof our political system would be to re-empower the Electoral Commission, which was defanged – again, by Boris Johnson – in 2022. It needs to have its independence from government restored, and to be able to impose the kind of fines that would make even a US billionaire think before seeking to undermine the integrity of our elections. We also need to toughen the law to impose serious criminal penalties for anyone who breaks the law anyway.Democracy is in retreat everywhere, and we cannot be complacent that Britain’s version will survive today’s challenges just because it has in the past. But if we use Trump’s election as the impetus to finally build defences for our political system against dark money and its owners, then at least some good will have come out of it.

      Oliver Bullough is the author of Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals, and Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back More

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      I understand why Joe Biden wants to protect his son Hunter. But it doesn’t make it right | Arwa Mahdawi

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      ‘No one is above the law,” Joe Biden tweeted in May. He probably should have added a caveat to that because his own son appears to be floating far above the scales of justice. On Sunday the president issued a “full and unconditional” pardon to his middle child, Hunter, who was facing possible prison time for convictions on gun and tax charges. Biden and his spokespeople had previously insisted – at least seven times – that the president would not pardon his 54-year-old son and Donald Trump is, predictably, having a field day with the U-turn.A little background for those who haven’t been following the misadventures of Hunter Biden as closely as Republicans have. Despite the fact that, unlike Trump’s children, Hunter has never held a position in Biden’s administration, Republicans are obsessed with the man and have used his problems to attack the president. And Hunter has made this easy: he has a history of dubious business dealings and his struggles with addiction have led to numerous personal scandals that have been disgracefully weaponised. At one point, the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene showed nude photos of Hunter engaged in sex acts to the House oversight committee.After years of legal and political scrutiny, Hunter pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges in September. He was accused of failing to pay $1.4m in taxes between 2016 and 2019, while court documents allege he was spending millions on “an extravagant lifestyle” including “escorts” and pornography. As well as the tax charges, Hunter was also found guilty in June of lying about his drug use while buying a gun in 2018. He was due for sentencing later this month, before daddy swooped in with a get-out-of-jail-free card.Pardoning friends and family isn’t unprecedented. Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother Roger Clinton and Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s father, along with various associates. But that doesn’t mean we should dismiss Biden pardoning his son as a nothingburger, as many liberals appear keen to do. It doesn’t make Biden – who, again, insisted on multiple occasions that he wouldn’t pardon his son and who made respecting the rule of law a fundamental part of his brand – any less of a hypocrite. It doesn’t make this any less damaging for people’s trust in politicians and institutions.Biden, of course, doesn’t think of himself as a hypocrite. He has an excuse for his volte-face. One that sounds similarly like the excuses Trump has used to minimise his own legal troubles: he’s being persecuted! “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son,” Biden wrote in a statement.To be fair, that’s partly true. Even some Republicans have admitted “the average American” without a history of violent crime probably wouldn’t have gone to trial for Hunter’s gun case. But that doesn’t make the man any less guilty.More broadly, it feels a little rich to complain about Hunter being persecuted for his name when Biden’s son has spent his entire life profiting from it. We’re not talking about some kid who was quietly trying to build his own life; we’re talking about a man who has consistently tried to squeeze as much money out of his connections to his dad as possible. Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine and China arguably went well beyond run-of-the-mill nepotism and raised serious questions about conflicts of interest. Then there are Hunter’s terrible paintings, which have miraculously sold to 10 buyers for a total of $1.5m in recent years.Look, I can certainly understand why Biden wants to protect his child. We all want to protect our children. But one thing Biden’s presidency and his enabling of what many experts have termed a genocide in Gaza has made clear, is that the law doesn’t protect all children equally. As I write this, the former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant – who has an active warrant for his arrest from the international criminal court (ICC) – is in New York before meeting with members of the Biden administration. His invitation to the US is essentially a middle finger to international law and the ICC from Biden, who has continuously shielded Israel from facing any sort of accountability. That’s a far bigger deal to me than Biden pardoning Hunter but it’s part of the same problem: a two-tiered justice system that routinely shields the powerful and punishes the powerless. Some people are born Hunters, others prey. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

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      Millions of Mexican Americans were deported in the 1930s. Are we about to repeat this ‘ethnic cleansing’?

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      One sunny afternoon in February, a large group of plainclothes federal agents descended on Los Angeles’s La Placita Park, a sanctuary and bustling cultural hub for the city’s growing Mexican diaspora. Wielding guns and batons, they barricaded the park and demanded proof of citizenship or legal residency from the congregants trapped within.Those who failed to produce papers were arrested. More than 400 people were detained and forced on a train back to Mexico, a place many had never been.It’s a scene many fear will come to pass in president-elect Donald Trump’s second term, especially after he doubled down on a campaign promise to “launch the largest deportation operation” in US history, and confirmed he would use the military to execute hardline immigration policies.But this particular episode happened in 1931, as part of an earlier era of mass deportations that scholars say is reminiscent of what is unfolding today.The La Placita sweep became the first public immigration raid in Los Angeles, and one of the largest in a wave of “repatriation drives” that rolled across the country during the Great Depression. Mexican farm workers, indiscriminately deemed “illegal aliens”, became scapegoats for job shortages and shrinking public benefits. President Herbert Hoover’s provocative slogan, “American jobs for real Americans”, kicked off a spate of local legislation banning employment of anyone of Mexican descent. Police descended on workplaces, parks, hospitals and social clubs, arresting and dumping people across the border in trains and buses.View image in fullscreenNearly 2 million Mexican Americans, more than half US citizens, were deported without due process. Families were torn apart, and many children never again saw their deported parents.Hoover’s Mexican repatriation program is, among mass deportation efforts in the past, most similar to Trump’s stated plans, said Kevin R Johnson, a professor of public interest law and Chicana/o studies at the University of California, Davis, School of Law.“This was a kind of ethnic cleansing, an effort to remove Mexicans from parts of the country,” Johnson said. “This episode had a ripple effect that lasted generations, and a long-term impact on the sense of identity on persons of Mexican ancestry.”In Los Angeles, Johnson said, it was a common practice for Mexicans to deny their Mexican ancestry and claim Spanish or European heritage to avoid suspicion. Well into the 1960s, Johnson said, people were afraid to leave home without a passport or identification papers lest they be arrested. More than 400,000 Mexican Americans were deported in California alone, but the legacy of repatriation went unacknowledged for many decades. Finally, in 2005, California state senator Joseph Dunn helped pass legislation apologizing to people who suffered under the program.Since his first presidential run, Trump has invoked President Dwight D Eisenhower’s mass deportation program as a blueprint for his own agenda. During the second world war, the US and Mexican government enacted the Bracero program that allowed Mexican farm hands to temporarily work in the US. But many growers continued to hire undocumented immigrants because it was cheaper. In 1954, the Eisenhower administration cracked down on undocumented labor by launching “Operation Wetback”, a yearlong series of raids named after a racial epithet for people who illegally crossed the Rio Grande.Border patrol agents used military-style tactics to sweep up laborers from farms and factories and send them back to Mexico. More than 3,000 people were expelled every day, and many died under inhumane conditions in detention and transport. The government said it deported more than 1 million people in total, though historians have put the actual number at closer to 300,000.The politics of deportation have always contained an important “racial dimension”, said Mae Ngai, a historian whose book Impossible Subjects explores how illegal migration became the central issue in US immigration policy.View image in fullscreenTrump has deployed racist tropes against various ethnic groups, including Mexicans as drug-dealing “rapists” and Haitians as pet eaters, while lamenting a lack of transplants from “nice”, white-majority countries like Denmark and Switzerland. Last month, sources close to the president told NBC News that he could prioritize deporting undocumented Chinese nationals.“He’s been very clear about going after people of color, people from ‘shithole countries,’” she said, referring to a 2018 remark from Trump about crisis-stricken nations like El Salvador and Haiti.Trump could plausibly deport a million people using military-style raids of the Eisenhower-era, Ngai said, but it is unlikely that he can expel 11 million undocumented immigrants. (According to an estimate by the American Immigration Council, deporting 1 million people a year would cost more than $960bn over a decade.) Still, Ngai said, his rhetoric alone could foment fear and panic in immigrant communities.But Eisenhower’s immigration approach also differed from Trump’s in notable ways, Ngai said. Though the administration did launch flashy raids, it also allowed farm owners to rehire some deportees through the Bracero program, essentially creating a pathway for authorized entry into the US. So far, Ngai said, Trump has hammered down on deportations without providing an option for legal immigration or naturalization. “He doesn’t know the whole story of ‘Operation Wetback’,” she said.Deportations also appear to have harmed the local economy. Far from protecting jobs for white Americans, the repatriation of Mexicans “may have further increased unemployment and depressed wages” in the 1930s, according to a 2017 academic paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Economists today predict a similar outcome: expelling millions of undocumented construction, hospitality and agriculture workers could shrink the GDP by $1.7tn, according to a study by the American Immigration Council.Johnson said there’s little evidence to suggest that the mass deportation efforts of the 1930s and 1950s were successful at curbing illegal immigration. The number of undocumented immigrants has tripled since the 1990s, he said, despite a steady rise in border security measures and patrol agents. “It’s a mistake to think building a wall or engaging in nasty deportation campaigns will end undocumented immigration,” Johnson said. “As long as people can obtain work legally or illegally, they’re going to keep coming.”But fearmongering may be the true legacy and intention of mass deportations campaigns, Johnson said. Self-deportation has been the policy preference for establishment Republicans, he said, including former presidential candidate Mitt Romney. “Part of the strategy,” Johnson said, “is making the lives of undocumented immigrants so unpleasant that some will just leave, and discourage others from coming”. More