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      Trump promises ‘fully expedited approvals and permits’ to billionaire investors in the US – live

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      As he closed his speech at the Brookings Institution, Joe Biden singled out Project 2025 as being particularly harmful, and said he hoped Donald Trump does not follow the rightwing blueprint’s proposals to remake the US government.“I pray to God the president-elect throws away Project 2025. I think it’d be an economic disaster for us and the region,” Biden said.Trump has publicly repudiated Project 2025, but since winning re-election has appointed conservatives involved in drawing up the document to positions in his incoming administration. Here’s more on what they might do:We’re pausing this blog for now. Thanks for following along.

      In a speech billed at promoting his economic accomplishments, Joe Biden warned Donald Trump against imposing tariffs and cutting taxes – two of the key planks of his successful re-election campaign. The president also defended America’s dominant role in global affairs, and said implementing Project 2025 would result in “economic disaster”.

      Earlier in the day, Senate Democrats convened a hearing meant to explore the implications of Trump’s vow to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Senate judiciary committee chair Dick Durbin said such deportations “would damage our economy and separate American families”. Lindsey Graham, the top-ranking Republican on the committee, promised senators would get to work on a “transformational border security bill” as soon as Trump takes office.
      Here’s what else happened today:

      Adam Schiff, a Democratic former member of the January 6 committee, said he did not think it was necessary for Biden to issue pre-emptive pardons to the panel’s members, despite Trump’s threats to jail them.

      Mitch McConnell, the 82-year-old outgoing Senate Republican leader, suffered a fall, but has been cleared to get back to work.

      The New York attorney general, Letitia James, reportedly told Trump’s attorneys she will keep pursuing the $454m-plus judgment levied against him for business fraud.

      Matt Gaetz is joining rightwing broadcaster One America News Network as an anchor.

      Trump was up late last night, writing weird stuff about Canada.
      Adam Schiff, a Democratic former member of the January 6 committee, said he did not think it was necessary for Joe Biden to issue pre-emptive pardons to those involved in the bipartisan House investigation of the attack on the Capitol.In an interview over the weekend, Donald Trump alleged that the committee had destroyed its evidence, and the committee members “should go to jail”. The committee’s report and its supporting documents remain publicly available online.Speaking at the Capitol, Schiff, who was just sworn in as a senator representing California, said:
      I don’t think the incoming president should be threatening his political opponents with jail time. That’s not the kind of talk we should hear from the president in a democracy. Nor do I think that a pardon is necessary for the members of the January 6th Committee.
      We’re proud of the work we did in that committee. It was fundamental oversight obligation to investigate the first attempt to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power in our history.
      Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell was injured in a fall today, but has been cleared to get back to work, his office said.“Leader McConnell tripped following lunch. He sustained a minor cut to the face and sprained his wrist. He has been cleared to resume his schedule,” a spokesperson for the long-serving Senate Republican leader said.McConnell, 82, is in his final weeks leading the party in the Senate. John Thune will be the GOP leader next year, when the party takes the majority in the chamber.Last year, reports emerged that McConnell had suffered multiple falls, and he also repeatedly appeared to freeze up in public. He is expected to continue serving as a senator representing Kentucky through 2026, when his current term expires.Further deepening his unusually close ties with billionaires, Donald Trump has promised “fully expedited approvals and permits” to people who invest $1bn or more in the United States.Writing on Truth Social, Trump said:
      Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!
      Trump has nominated several billionaires to his cabinet, and put the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of the quasi-governmental “Department of Government Efficiency”. Here’s more about that:Dozens of Nobel laureates have banded together to urge the Senate to reject Robert F Kennedy Jr, the conspiracy theorist who Donald Trump nominated to lead the department of health and human services. Here’s more, from the Guardian’s Robert Tait:Seventy-seven Nobel laureates have signed a letter urging the US Senate to reject Robert F Kennedy Jr as Donald Trump’s nominee for health and human services secretary, arguing that he is unfit and would put American public health “in jeopardy”.It is believed to be the first time in living memory that Nobel prize winners have united against a presidential cabinet pick, and comes against a backdrop of Kennedy’s public support for discredited theories, including a claim that childhood vaccines cause autism.In their letter, prize winners in the fields of medicine, chemistry, physics and economics castigate Kennedy for a “lack of credentials” and point out that he has been “a belligerent critic” of some of the agencies that he would oversee, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).“The proposal to place Mr Kennedy in charge of the federal agencies responsible for protecting the public health of American citizens and for conducting the medical research that benefits our country and the rest of humanity has been widely criticised on multiple grounds,” the laureates say in the letter, first obtained by the New York Times.Donald Trump’s picks for FBI director and attorney general have former federal prosecutors worried, the Guardian’s Peter Stone reports:By tapping two combative ultra-loyalists to run the FBI and the justice department, Donald Trump has sparked fears they will pursue the president-elect’s calls for “revenge” against his political foes and sack officials who Trump demonizes as “deep state” opponents, say ex-justice department prosecutors.Kash Patel and Pam Bondi, who Trump has nominated to run the FBI and Department of Justice, respectively, have been unswerving loyalists to Trump for years, promoting Trump’s false claims that his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden was due to fraud.Patel was a top lawyer on the House intelligence panel under rightwing member Devin Nunes for part of Trump’s first term and then held a few posts in the Trump administration including at the national security council advising the president.Bondi, a recent corporate lobbyist and an ex-Florida attorney general, defended Trump during his first impeachment and was active on the campaign trail during the late stages of his 2024 run.Patel and Bondi have each echoed Trump’s calls for taking revenge against key Democrats and officials, including ones who pursued criminal charges against Trump for his aggressive efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat and his role in inflaming the January 6 attack on the Capitol that led to five deaths.Trump has lavished praise on both picks, calling Patel a “brilliant lawyer” and “advocate for truth”, while hailing Bondi as “loyal” and “qualified”. But critics say their rhetoric and threats are “incredibly harmful to public trust” in the two agencies undermining the integrity of the FBI and justice department, and potentially spurring violence.Alternatively, Merchan could choose to uphold the verdict and proceed to sentencing or delay the case until Trump leaves office.Trump will be the first president, former or current, to be a convicted criminal.In more Trump legal news, the president-elect might lose his months-long fight to reverse his conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records, the Associated Press reports.Prosecutors are trying to convince Judge Juan M Merchan, acting justice of the New York state supreme court in New York county, to preserve Donald Trump’s hush money criminal conviction before he becomes president. This way, the case would be permanently suspended, allowing Trump’s conviction to stand and bar any attempts to appeal.Trump’s legal team has urged Merchan to dismiss the case and argue letting it go on would cause unconstitutional “disruptions” to his presidency.Some background: Trump has been convicted of manipulating documents to conceal a $130,000 payment to pornographic film actor Stormy Daniels in order to quiet her claim that they had sexual relations more than a decade ago. Trump denies any wrongdoing.Here’s more, from the AP:
      Prosecutors are urging a judge not to throw out President-elect Donald Trump’s hush money criminal conviction but suggesting a willingness to end the case in a way that would preserve the verdict while avoiding punishment or a protracted legal fight.
      In court papers made public on Tuesday, the Manhattan district attorney’s office proposed an array of options for keeping the historic conviction on the books, including asking Judge Juan M. Merchan to consider treating the case the way he would when a defendant dies.
      That would effectively put the case into a permanent state of suspended animation. Trump’s conviction would stand, but everything would freeze, including any appeal action. It is unclear if that option is viable under New York law.
      “As applied here, this Court could similarly terminate the criminal proceeding by placing a notation in the record that the jury verdict removed the presumption of innocence; that defendant was never sentenced; and that his conviction was neither affirmed nor reversed on appeal because of presidential immunity,” prosecutors wrote in an 82-page filing.
      Among the other options prosecutors proposed was delaying sentencing until after Trump leaves office in 2029. However, they were adamant that the conviction should stand, arguing that Trump’s impending return to the White House should not upend a jury’s finding.
      In a speech billed at promoting his economic accomplishments, Joe Biden warned Donald Trump against imposing tariffs and cutting taxes – two of the key planks of his successful re-election campaign. The president also defended America’s dominant role in global affairs, and said implementing Project 2025 would result in “economic disaster”. Earlier in the day, Senate Democrats convened a hearing meant to explore the implications of Trump’s vow to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Senate judiciary committee chair Dick Durbin said such deportations “would damage our economy and separate American families”. Lindsey Graham, the top-ranking Republican on the committee, promised senators would get to work on a “transformational border security bill” as soon as Trump takes office.Here’s what else is going on:

      New York attorney general Letitia James reportedly told Trump’s attorneys she will keep pursuing the $454m-plus judgment levied against him for business fraud.

      Matt Gaetz is joining rightwing broadcaster One America News Network as an anchor.

      Trump was up late last night, writing weird stuff about Canada.
      As he closed his speech at the Brookings Institution, Joe Biden singled out Project 2025 as being particularly harmful, and said he hoped Donald Trump does not follow the rightwing blueprint’s proposals to remake the US government.“I pray to God the president-elect throws away Project 2025. I think it’d be an economic disaster for us and the region,” Biden said.Trump has publicly repudiated Project 2025, but since winning re-election has appointed conservatives involved in drawing up the document to positions in his incoming administration. Here’s more on what they might do:With Donald Trump mulling pulling the country back from its international alliances and commitments, Joe Biden argued that it was essential that the United States remains dominant in global affairs.“If we do not lead the world, what nation leads the world?” Biden, his voice raised, said in a speech to the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington DC thinktank. “Who pulls Europe together, who tries to pull the Middle East together? How do in the Indian Ocean? What do we do in Africa? We, the United States, lead the world.”Referring to economic policies pursued by his administration and others that Trump has vowed to reverse, Biden said: “My hope and belief is that the decisions and investments that are now so deeply rooted through the nation, it’s going to be politically costly and economically unsound for the next president to disrupt.”Joe Biden singled out Donald Trump’s proposals to impose steep tariffs on US allies and rivals alike and to extend tax cuts enacted during his first administration as policies that would undermine the economy’s health.“By all accounts, the incoming administration is determined to return the country … [to] trickle-down economics, and another tax cut for the very wealthy that will not be paid for, or if paid for, is going to have a real cost, once again, causing massive deficits or significant cuts in basic programs of healthcare, education, veterans benefits,” Biden said.“On top of that, he seems determined to impose steep, universal tariffs on all imported goods brought to this country on the mistaken belief that foreign countries will bear the cost of those tariffs, rather than the American consumer. Who do you think pays for this? I believe this approach is a major mistake. I believe we’ve proven that approach is a mistake over the past four years, but … we will know in time what will happen.”Joe Biden has generally refrained from criticizing Donald Trump since his presidential election victory, but subtly needled his Republican successor in a speech where the president defended his economic record.“Next month, my administration will end, and a new administration will begin. Most economists agree the new administration is going to inherit a fairly strong economy, at least at the moment, an economy going through fundamental transformation that’s laid out a stronger foundation and a sustainable, broad-based, highly productive growth,” Biden said. “It is my profound hope that the new administration will preserve and build on this progress.”Later on, Trump singled out Trump for criticism over his handling of the pandemic. “The previous administration, quite frankly, had no plan, real plan, to get us through one of the toughest periods in our nation’s history,” Biden said.And though Trump campaigned on tearing up Biden’s legislative accomplishments – and has the votes to do it, thanks to Republican victories that will give them control of Congress – the president predicted that undoing his 2022 effort to overhaul the nation’s infrastructure will be impossible, since it benefits so many red states.“We had infrastructure week for four years, nothing got built,” Biden said, in yet another dig at Trump.“Everybody said when I wanted to have an infrastructure bill that mattered, over $1.3tn, we’d never get it done. We got it done. The next president has a gameplan I laid out, and by the way, he’s going to find, since I made a promise I’d invest as much in red states as blue, he’s gonna have trouble not doing it. He’s gonna have a lot of red state senators that are opposed to all of it and voted for it deciding it’s very much in their interest to build the facilities that are on the block.”A Senate hearing on mass deportations ended on a bitter note, with a series of back-and-forths between Republicans on the committee and a majority witness invited to testify about the cost and economic impact of removing millions of immigrants from the labor force.Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, repeatedly testified that he did not support “open borders” despite Republican senators claiming he did.Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana spent his allotted time questioning Reichlin-Melnick about old tweets while Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, called him a part of the problem. A pre-election report published by the American Immigration Council, which supports comprehensive immigration reform, found that mass deportations on the scale Donald Trump has proposed would cost at least $315bn and would hurt the economy, especially in key industries like agriculture and constructionThe exchanges underscored just how polarized Congress is over the issue and how little appetite there is for compromise in an area that was at the heart of Trump’s re-election pitch. In a sign that Democrats are scrambling for a response, several senators stressed their agreement with Republicans and Trump that immigrants with a criminal record should be deported, while also talking about the importance of protecting Dreamers.Matt Gaetz, who resigned his seat in Congress after Donald Trump nominated him as his attorney general, only to withdraw his nomination after reports emerged of sexual misconduct, has joined the One America News Network (OAN), a rightwing outlet.Starting in January, Gaetz will host a one-hour prime-time show aptly titled “The Matt Gaetz Show”, and also co-host a video podcast, the network announced.“OAN is blazing a trail in media, embracing not just traditional news but the platforms where Americans are going – streaming, apps, podcasts, and social media. I couldn’t be more thrilled to join OAN’s forward-thinking team and be part of this revolutionary expansion,” Gaetz said in a statement.New York attorney general Letitia James has told Donald Trump’s attorneys that she will continue pursuing a $454m civil fraud judgment her office won against the president-elect, despite his looming inauguration, the Hill reports.Trump’s lawyers had asked her to support vacating the judgment, citing his presidential election victory. In a letter in response, James said: “Mr. Trump’s upcoming inauguration as the next president of the United States has no bearing on the pendency of defendants’ appeal in this action. “An appeals court heard arguments in September in Trump’s challenge to the civil fraud judgment, which centered on claims that he inflated his wealth to secure better lending conditions. Here’s more: More

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      Trump first-term inquiry into leakers led to invasive searches, report finds

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      A Department of Justice (DoJ) investigation aimed at finding leakers during Donald Trump’s first presidency resulted in invasive searches of congressional staffers’ phone and email records, often without specific cause or the prior approval of the attorney general, a report published on Tuesday has found.In findings that may trigger concerns of how Trump’s incoming administration will behave, the department’s inspector general concluded that DoJ lawyers overreached their authority in their inquiries aimed at discovering who was leaking classified information in 2017, in the early phases of the president-elect’s first stint in the White House.The phone records of two Congress members and 43 staffers – including 21 Democrats and 20 Republicans, along with two holding non-partisan roles – were sought in an aggressive effort to find the source of leaks following the firing of James Comey, the former FBI director, who was ousted by Trump.Although Michael Horowitz’s 96-page report did not identify those whose records had been searched, CNN reported that they included Kash Patel, whom Trump has nominated to be the next FBI director. Patel was a staff member of the House of Representatives’ intelligence committee at the time of the DoJ leak inquiry.Others included the then House member, and recently elected Democratic senator, Adam Schiff – branded as an “enemy within” by Trump in his successful recent presidential election campaign – and Eric Swalwell, another Democratic representative.DoJ prosecutors also sought the records of journalists from the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN as part of the investigation.The subpoenaing of reporters’ records during the first Trump administration has been previously reported and was described as “simply, simply wrong” by Joe Biden in 2021, leading to the DoJ announcing it would no longer seek a legal process to find out journalists’ sources.Since his first presidency, Trump has pledged to jail reporters who do not divulge their sources on stories he considers to have national security implications – a threat now carrying greater weight with his imminent return to the White House.Horowitz said many of the congressional records had been obtained without just cause and, as such, put Congress’s constitutional oversight function of the executive branch at risk.“[D]ozens of congressional staffers became part of the subject pool in a federal criminal investigation for doing nothing more than performing constitutionally authorized oversight of the executive branch,” he wrote.“We believe that using compulsory process to obtain such records when based solely on the close proximity in time between access to the classified information and subsequent publication of the information – which was the case with most of the process issued for non-content communications records of congressional staff in the investigations we examined – risks chilling Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch.”The report said DoJ prosecutors did not take into account important constitutional principles governing the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches.The subpoenas requested records of whom staff had spoken to and for how long, rather than the content of their conversations.However, even such limited requests amounted to an encroachment on Congress’s constitutional powers, the report suggested.It stated: “Even non-content communications records – such as those predominantly sought here – can reveal the fact of sensitive communications of members of Congress and staffers, including with executive branch whistleblowers and with interest groups engaging in First Amendment activity.”Criticism of the department for over-zealousness during Trump’s first administration seems ironic given his insistent claims that it was weaponised against him after he left office to press criminal charges that he has dismissed as a political witch-hunt and which he has demanded be purged.It may also foreshadow developments in his forthcoming presidency after he nominated a staunch loyalist, Pam Bondi, as attorney general, after his original pick, Matt Gaetz, stepped aside amid allegations of sexual misconduct. Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to bring the DoJ under direct White House control, in contrast with the quasi-independent status it has held since the Watergate era.He has also spoken of using it to pursue his political opponents and enemies. More

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      Disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner retrying comeback

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      Anthony Weiner, the former congressman who suffered one of the most spectacular falls from grace in US politics after he was embroiled in a sexting scandal that some blame for Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 presidential election, has formally initiated yet another attempt at a comeback.Weiner, 60, has officially registered as a candidate for a New York City council seat. The filing with the city’s campaign finance board, which was first reported by the New York Post’s Craig McCarthy, marks Weiner’s latest attempt to claw his way back into public office despite his scandal-laced past.The disgraced politician’s longstanding X account reposted news of the candidate filing on Tuesday with the comment: “Mr Moneybags over here.” The remark was an apparent ironic reference to the fact that he has so far recorded zero dollars in supporters’ donations for his campaign coffers.In recent weeks, Weiner has been dangling the possibility of an attempted return to public life in front of media outlets, including his own The Middle radio show on WABC. In a recent broadcast, he told his listeners that he still craved public service, addressing his sexual misdeeds, which culminated in him serving 18 months in prison for sexually messaging an underaged girl.He said on the show that “the things in my past, the things about my addiction, the things about my acting out, the things about my background – it’s a lot, it’s a lot. But we’re at a moment that we Democrats, we seem like we come into knife fights carrying library books all the time.”Weiner has been assailed by scandal since he crashed out of Congress in 2011 after 13 years representing New Yorkers. His downfall came amid a sexting scandal involving explicit messages sent to several women, as well as the underaged girl.He made his first comeback pitch in 2013, running for New York mayor, only to flame out again in a renewed scandal over sexual texts sent under the cover name Carlos Danger.But it was the inadvertent role that Weiner played in Clinton’s agonizing defeat when Donald Trump clinched his first presidency for which Weiner will be most remembered – unflatteringly so – by many Democrats. In 2016, federal prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into Weiner’s exchange of lewd photos with a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina.The inquiry became entangled with Clinton’s White House bid because Weiner’s then wife, Huma Abedin, was vice-chair of the Democratic nominee’s presidential campaign. In the course of the investigation into Weiner’s sexting, FBI agents found emails on his personal laptop that led them to reopen an investigation into a private email server used by Clinton.The investigation, reopened just days before the 2016 election, was rapidly concluded with no incriminating evidence found against Clinton. But the damage had been done as Trump took the decisive electoral college victory despite losing the popular vote.To this day, Weiner’s sexual misconduct is regarded by many in the Democratic party as a factor behind Clinton’s defeat – and hence Trump’s elevation to the White House, which he retook in the 5 November election against Kamala Harris after losing the 2020 race to Joe Biden.“Everyone deserves a second chance,” another candidate vying for the city council seat, Sarah Batchu, told the New Republic recently. “But this guy has had third, fourth and fifth chances.” More

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      Key US unit fighting disinformation abroad in jeopardy ahead of Trump return

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      The Global Engagement Center (GEC), a state department unit critical to combating foreign disinformation, will not receive a multi-year extension in the latest National Defense Authorization Act, putting its future operations in jeopardy.The next chapter of the GEC – which only addresses foreign influence operations outside the United States – now relies on Congress to come up with an extension some other way by 24 December, or the United States faces a potential gap in their international disinformation response capabilities.In response to the NDAA snub over the weekend, a state department spokesperson told the Guardian: “As our adversaries continue to ramp up their efforts globally, it’s counterintuitive – and dangerous – to weaken or worse yet dismantle, the US’s leadership in this critical mission.”The GEC is looking to be the latest institutional target to get hit by congressional Republicans, who have grown increasingly skeptical of the center and other US agencies for allegedly censoring conservative viewpoints. Last year, the Republican-led House judiciary committee labelled the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as “the nerve center” of the government’s social media censorship apparatus.The GEC has been instrumental in exposing significant disinformation campaigns in Latin America and Moldova, including a complex Russian operation in Africa called the “African Initiative” this year. This campaign sought to undermine US and western influence by spreading conspiracy theories about US-funded health programs through social media, websites and Telegram channels.Bipartisan supporters, including Chris Murphy, a Connecticut senator, and John Cornyn, a Texas senator, had proposed an amendment to extend the center’s mandate through 2031, but the effort ultimately failed to make it into the final NDAA text.Marco Rubio, a Florida senator, Trump’s pick for secretary of state, has long been vocal about his concerns about foreign influence operations by way of China and Russia. His office did not respond to a request for comment on whether it would back the state’s GEC entering a new era.Several prominent Republican lawmakers, including the outgoing House foreign affairs chair Michael McCaul, have criticized the GEC for allegedly overstepping its mandate. Those lawmakers argue that the center, through its connection with the UK-based Global Disinformation Index, has been complicit in labeling conservative media outlets as high-risk for spreading disinformation.“A win for free speech and Main Street America!” the House Committee on Small Business posted on X on Tuesday. “The shuttering of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center means there is one less way for unelected bureaucrats to violate Americans’ First Amendment rights.”According to the center’s own assessment, countries like China have invested “billions of dollars” to exert global information control through disinformation and propaganda. More

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      Trump picks Maga darling Harmeet Dhillon to lead civil rights cases at DoJ

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      Donald Trump picked Harmeet Dhillon, a Maga darling and ardent supporter, to lead civil rights cases at the US Department of Justice, a sign of major changes ahead in the agency’s priorities.Dhillon made her name in Maga circles by taking on culture-war cases as a San Francisco lawyer and became a fixture in rightwing media, appearing often on Fox shows. She has filed various lawsuits over election “integrity” issues and supported Trump’s quests to overturn results in 2020.In announcing Dhillon’s nomination, Trump cited a laundry list of cases she’s working on, including “taking on Big Tech for censoring our Free Speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID, and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers”.He also mentioned how Dhillon’s lawsuits on election law fought to “ensure that all, and ONLY, legal votes are counted”.“In her new role at the DOJ, Harmeet will be a tireless defender of our Constitutional Rights, and will enforce our Civil Rights and Election Laws FAIRLY and FIRMLY,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.“I’m extremely honored by President Trump’s nomination to assist with our nation’s civil rights agenda,” Dhillon wrote on Twitter/X after the nomination. “It has been my dream to be able to serve our great country, and I am so excited to be part of an incredible team of lawyers led by @PamBondi. I cannot wait to get to work!”Trump previously announced Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida and a Trump defense attorney, as his pick to lead the justice department.As a lawyer in California, Dhillon has sued the University of California, Berkeley for its speech policies, represented rightwing undercover operation Project Veritas and the former Fox host Tucker Carlson, and filed lawsuits over pandemic restrictions. She served as a legal adviser to Trump in 2020 and ran to replace Ronna McDaniel as chair of the Republican National Committee in 2023, seeking to make the party organization more Trump-friendly. During the 2024 election, she was dispatched to Arizona by the Trump campaign, a decision that some saw as a sign the campaign was ready to make aggressive legal moves if needed to win there.She founded a legal non-profit, the Center for American Liberty, which uses the courts to go after violations of civil liberties and defend against the “coordinated assault on our civil liberties from corporations, politicians, socialist revolutionaries, and inept or biased government officials”, the organization’s website says.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA Guardian investigation in 2023 found that the non-profit paid Dhillon’s law firm, Dhillon Law Group, at least $1.32m, which experts said was “problematic”. The reporting also noted that Dhillon was paid a $120,000 salary from the non-profit for working two hours a week.Democracy Docket said Dhillon has emerged as “one of the leading legal figures working to roll back voting rights across the country”. It tracked Dhillon or other attorneys at her firms as being involved in more than a dozen lawsuits across the states that challenged voting rights, election processes or Trump’s eligibility for office. She defended Trump in the Colorado case challenging his ability to run for office because of the January 6 insurrection.“Democrats are conspiring to commit the biggest election interference fraud in world history, right before our eyes, as government officials avert their eyes to the mockery of the constitution and our laws,” she said in late 2023 of efforts to keep Trump off the ballot. “This is a low point in American history.”Dhillon also faced hateful backlash from the far-right over her religion after appearing at the Republican convention in 2024. Dhillon, who is Sikh, gave a Sikh prayer at the convention, which some far-right figures called blasphemous. Before her rise in Trumpworld, she gained public attention for writing legal memos defending Sikhs who wore turbans from racial profiling after the 9/11 attacks. More

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      The Guardian view on Trump’s threat to the media: time to pass the Press Act

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      Fears of a press crackdown under Donald Trump’s second term deepened with his nomination of Kash Patel as FBI director – given his calls for retribution against journalists. Yet a rare chance to protect press freedom has emerged. The bipartisan Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (Press) Act, the strongest press freedom legislation in US history, is on the brink of a vote. While President-elect Trump has urged Republicans to block it, the Senate could still deliver it to Joe Biden before the lame-duck session ends in January.The Press Act would ban secret government demands for journalists’ communications from tech giants such as Google or Verizon and protect reporters from jail for refusing to reveal sources. For investigative reporters to do their jobs – holding government officials to account for corruption and wrongdoing – they need to be able to protect the confidentiality of their sources. With courts recently weakening already-imperilled “reporter’s privilege” protections, this bill would finally give journalists in the US federal protections comparable to those afforded to other relationships where confidentiality is paramount, such as lawyers and clients, doctors and patients, and spouses.The bill has something for both Democrats and Republicans to like. The Press Act’s broad and nonpartisan definition of “journalist” takes into account the modern media landscape: you don’t have to work full-time for a mainstream media organisation to be covered. Freelancers, independent reporters writing Substack newsletters and even journalists posting primarily to social networks such as X would be included. It protects right-leaning journalists just as much as anyone at the New York Times or the Guardian.It also has commonsense national security exceptions (like preventing a terrorist attack or an imminent threat of violence) without diluting the bill’s strong protections. It’s worth remembering that Democratic administrations have abused their powers to go after the first amendment rights of journalists just as much as Republicans. The Obama administration brought a record number of prosecutions against whistleblowers, and was implicated in several government spying scandals, including secretly targeting journalists at the Associated Press and Fox News.Even the Biden administration, before reversing course after public outrage, continued pursuing at least some of the surveillance orders against news outlets that the first Trump administration initiated. That’s why, in an age of extreme political polarisation, the Press Act is about as bipartisan as it gets. The House passed the bill early in 2024 unanimously, with several prominent Republicans publicly touting its importance. The bill also has powerful co-sponsors in the Senate, ranging from Democrats such as Ron Wyden and Dick Durbin, the judiciary committee chair, to Trump-supporting Republicans like Mike Lee and Lindsey Graham.Even the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson supports the bill, as he made clear in a recent interview he did with the former Fox News and CBS reporter Catherine Herridge, who was subpoenaed to reveal a source for a story she wrote several years ago. She was recently in front of the DC court of appeals, where her lawyers argued that forcing reporters to reveal their sources in court sends a chilling effect to countless others around the country. For the bill to pass, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, must make it a priority. The lame-duck session is only a few weeks long; if senators don’t act now, we may not have this opportunity for another decade or more.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      The Guardian view on the EU-Mercosur trade deal: another farmer flashpoint approaches | Letters

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      Anticipating the strong protectionist winds that will blow from Donald Trump’s White House, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has been responding by making her own economic weather. Last week, Ms von der Leyen flew to Montevideo, 5,000 miles south of Washington DC, to controversially conclude negotiations in one of the biggest free trade agreements in history. Twenty-five years in the making, the Mercosur trade deal opens up trade between the EU and a Latin American bloc of partners comprising Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.In theory, the agreement promises a more open market of 700 million people for products ranging from Argentine beef to German cars. For European manufacturers, it would eliminate tariffs on a majority of goods. As Mr Trump threatens to impose heavy tariffs on Chinese and European exports, here was evidence, asserted Ms von der Leyen, “that openness and cooperation are the true engines of progress and prosperity”.This sunny analysis does not, however, tell the whole story. From an economic perspective, the Mercosur deal makes sense for Europe, offering an alternative market in the event of US tariffs and amid the continuing Chinese slowdown. It also deepens European connections with the global south, at a time when Beijing is doing the same in systematic fashion. But the political realities are treacherous: opposing Mercosur is a common cause celebre among European farmers, who fear being undercut by Latin American producers who are not subject to the same environmental standards.At the end of a year in which farmers’ protests have made headlines across the continent, and far-right parties have exploited rural resentment to attack the EU’s green transition, this is territory to be navigated with extreme care. The deal has yet to be ratified, and EU member states are split. Germany, desperate to shore up its export industry, is strongly in favour. France, whose farmers famously carry immense political clout, is implacably opposed. Serious reservations have been expressed by the Netherlands, Poland, Austria, Italy and Ireland.Less than a month after officially beginning her second term in office, Ms von der Leyen is taking a risk by pushing ahead at pace when such divisions exist. Approval of the trade part of the overall deal may be subject to a qualified majority vote, meaning that France would not be able to exercise its veto. That would be grist to Marine Le Pen’s mill, given that, in one recent poll, almost two-thirds of French citizens said they no longer had confidence in the EU. Meanwhile, the prospect of a disunited European front – with France and Germany at loggerheads – as Mr Trump enters the White House, is not an uplifting one.In the quarter of a century since the Mercosur negotiations began, the negative impacts of globalisation on particular European regions and economic sectors have driven a backlash that has benefited the far right. Trade deals are about politics as well as economics. To avoid the fallout of this deal overshadowing the economic gains, Brussels should make it a priority that losers from it are adequately compensated. Bypassing a necessary battle for hearts and minds, as the EU confronts new geopolitical challenges without and the rise of Eurosceptic nationalism within, is not a viable option.

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      You can judge someone by their enemies. I write for the Guardian because it has all the right ones | Arwa Mahdawi

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      The year is 2050. The US government is run by President Elon Musk and his 690 children. Donald Trump, immortalized as an AI hologram, continues to send ALL CAPS tweets ALL THE TIME. The US has a special new relationship with the UK: the British Isles have been turned into a SpaceX rocket factory.In this brave new world, might is right. International human rights law doesn’t exist anymore. Journalists don’t exist either. Kash Patel, who Trump picked as his FBI director in 2024, promised to “come after people in the media” and he followed through. Now state news is piped directly into people’s brains via Musk’s proprietary microchips.I wish I could say this was all tongue-in-cheek, all completely fantastical. But it increasingly feels like we are marching towards a techno-authoritarian future. Over the past year we’ve seen norms shattered. We’ve seen what Amnesty International, along with many leading experts, have termed a genocide in Gaza, become horrifically normalized. We’ve seen international law dangerously undermined, an accelerated rollback of reproductive rights, and attacks on press freedom. We’ve seen book bans, and school curriculums warped by rightwing ideologues – with public schools in Florida teaching the “benefits” of slavery.As Trump, who has called the press “the enemy of the people”, readies himself for his “revenge” term, we’ve also seen his former critics scramble to kiss the ring. Two major (billionaire-owned) US newspapers refused to endorse a candidate in the US election, seemingly out of fear of getting on Trump’s wrong side. Anticipatory obedience, a term coined by the historian Timothy Snyder, is the phrase of the moment.At the Guardian we’re already practicing anticipatory disobedience. You can judge someone by their enemies – and the Guardian has lots of enemies in high places. The delightful Musk has described the Guardian as “the most insufferable newspaper on planet Earth” and “a laboriously vile propaganda machine”. (Propaganda, you see, is when you hold the most powerful people on earth to account.)As you may have guessed, this is where I ask you to support our work – which, because we are not owned by oligarchs, is only possible because of readers like you.I want you to know that I don’t make this request lightly. Over the past year, which has been the very worst year of my life, I have woken up every day to horrific, and seemingly never-ending, pictures of dead children in Gaza and felt utter despair. I have watched as Palestinians like me are dehumanized by many in the western media. The likes of the editorial board of the Washington Post argue that there should be two tiers of justice, and the ICC shouldn’t investigate war crimes against Palestinians. I have agonized over the role of journalism and asked myself again and again what the point of writing is. And I have, to be completely honest, felt frustrated by some of the Guardian’s own coverage of Gaza.But I wouldn’t still be writing for the Guardian if I didn’t believe it to be an essential force for good in the world; one which we simply can’t afford to lose. I write for the Guardian, and I’m asking for your support now, because there is no other media outlet with the global reach – and no paywall – that stands for progressive values in the way that the Guardian does. There is certainly no other comparable media outlet that would have let me write uncensored about Palestine in the way the Guardian has.And, of course, I write about other things as well: everything from woke chicken to feminism to vagina candles. One of the things I appreciate most about the Guardian is that although we do serious work, we don’t always take ourselves too seriously – there’s still room for humor. And in dark times, humor is not some sort of indulgence, it’s essential to getting by.As we head into a new year I hope you will consider supporting us. At the very least, please do join me in putting a very delicate middle finger up to all the Musks of the world, who would be ecstatic if the Guardian ceased to exist.You can make your contribution to the Guardian here. More