US politics

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares54 Views

      in US Politics

      Bondi announces investigation into Epstein ties to Trump’s Democratic adversaries

      by

      Attorney general Pam Bondi announced on Friday afternoon that she had assigned Jay Clayton, the interim US attorney for the southern district of New York, to lead the investigation into Donald Trump’s political adversaries and their ties to Jeffrey Epstein, hours after the president directed her to do so.“Jay Clayton is one of the most capable and trusted prosecutors in the country, and I’ve asked him to take the lead,” Bondi said of the lawyer, who also served as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first administration. “As with all matters, the Department will pursue this with urgency and integrity to deliver answers to the American people.”The move represents an apparent departure from a July memo issued by the justice department and the FBI that stated officials had found nothing in the Epstein files that warranted the opening of further inquiries. Investigators “did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties”, the memo said.It comes as Trump has cranked up his intense pressure campaign on congressional Republicans to oppose the full release of the justice department’s files related to Epstein, before a crucial and long-awaited House vote on the matter next week that many Republicans are expected to support.The bombshell release on Wednesday of scores of Epstein’s emails has shone a spotlight on the president’s long history of involvement with the notorious sex trafficker, including revelations that he knew more about Epstein’s conduct than he has previously let on.On Friday morning, Trump declared that he would ask the Department of Justice to investigate Epstein’s ties with Democrats, not Republicans, singling out Bill Clinton, Larry Summers and Reid Hoffman. Trump also paradoxically referred to the “Epstein hoax” and called it a “scam”.It is expected that dozens of Republicans will vote next week for Republican Thomas Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna’s discharge petition, which demands the Department of Justice release all of its investigative files on Epstein within 30 days.The legislation had stalled because the House speaker, Mike Johnson, a Republican, had refused for almost two months during the government shutdown to swear in the new Democratic representative Adelita Grijalva, who would become the deciding 218th vote. After the shutdown ended, Johnson could delay no longer, and Grijalva was sworn in on Wednesday. The vote is now likely to happen early next week.Many House Republicans have constituents who say they want greater transparency about the Epstein affair. Representatives Don Bacon of Nebraska, Tim Burchett of Tennessee and Rob Bresnahan of Pennsylvania have indicated they would vote to release the files.The Trump administration has put heavy pressure on key Republicans to oppose the legislation. The New York Times reported that top officials summoned Lauren Boebert – one of four Republicans in the House who have signed the petition – to a meeting in the White House Situation Room with Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel to discuss her demand to release the files. Trump had also telephoned her early on Tuesday morning, a day before Grijalva was due to be sworn in and provide the crucial final signature.Trump also contacted Nancy Mace, another member of the Republican caucus in the House who has signed the petition, but the two did not connect. Mace instead reportedly wrote the president a long explanation of her own personal experience as a survivor of sexual abuse and rape, and why it was impossible for her to change her position on the matter. She wrote on X that “the Epstein petition is deeply personal”.Those failed lobbying attempts from the White House came as Democrats on the House oversight committee released three damning new emails that suggest Trump knew about Epstein’s conduct, including one in which the convicted paedophile said “of course [Trump] knew about the girls”. Another email described Trump as a “dog that hasn’t barked” and said he had “spent hours” with one victim at Epstein’s house.The president’s team struck back, saying those documents had been cherrypicked, and Republican representatives followed up by releasing a much bigger trove of more than 20,000 files.Among them were documents that revealed that Epstein’s staff kept him apprised of Trump’sair travel as it related to his own transportation – and that the late sex trafficker kept up with news about his former friend years after their relationship soured.But even if the bill passes the House, it still needs to get through the Senate and be signed by Trump. Senate leaders have shown no indication they will bring it up for a vote, and Trump – who had long promised the release of the files on the campaign trail – has decried the effort as a “Democrat hoax”.The justice department earlier this year announced it would release no further details about the case, prompting public demand for files related to the investigation into Epstein’s activities to be made public. More

    • 150 Shares54 Views

      in US Politics

      Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Summers’s exchanges depict relationship as confidants, emails reveal

      by

      A series of exchanges between child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary, showing a relationship as confidants emerged among the emails released by Republican legislators this week in the continuing political turmoil over Epstein’s connections to Donald Trump.The exchanges, from 2013 to early 2019, showed the two men sharing personal – and sometimes unseemly – views about politics and relationships.“I’m trying to figure why [the] American elite think if u murder your baby by beating and abandonment it must be irrelevant to your admission to Harvard,” Summers wrote to Epstein in a 2017 email. “But hit on a few women 10 years ago and can’t work at a network or think tank. DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT.”At the time, Harvard University was wrestling with an admissions debate after a formerly incarcerated woman’s admission to a PhD program. Summers, a former president of the university who lost his position in a scandal after making sexist comments about female academics, went on to say in the email to Epstein: “I observed that half of the IQ In [the] world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population.”Summers was once a leading light in Democratic circles – a former treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, one of the primary engineers of Barack Obama’s response to the financial crisis and a stalwart in the liberal commentariat. But questions have lingered about his association with Epstein, a longtime associate of Trump. Epstein was accused of running a wide-ranging child sex trafficking operation before his death in jail in 2019 in New York City.After the Wall Street Journal revealed a previous tranche of emails between Epstein and Summers in a 2023 piece, a spokesperson for Summers told the paper that he “deeply regrets being in contact with Epstein after his conviction”.Summers’s spokesperson has not yet responded to a request for comment from the Guardian.Democratic lawmakers released emails from the Epstein estate this week that suggest Epstein believed Trump was aware of conduct by the now-convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. In response, Republican lawmakers released a much bigger tranche of 20,000 emails from the Epstein estate.The documents show that Summers maintained congenial contact with the convicted child sex trafficker well into 2019, with the last email exchange occurring only months before Epstein’s arrest.Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday that he would be asking the Department of Justice and the FBI to investigate Epstein’s “involvement and relationship” with Summers, among other prominent Democrats and business leaders.In the emails, Summers and Epstein discuss politics – particularly Summers’s contempt for Trump – as well as the details of philanthropic social networking – and women. Summers, 70, confided in Epstein in a 2019 exchange about his romantic gestures toward an unnamed woman, and being rebuffed.“shes smart. making you pay for past errors,” Epstein wrote in an exchange on 16 March. “ignore the daddy im going to go out with the motorcycle guy, you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh.”Summers reiterated his regret to the Harvard Crimson on Wednesday. “I have great regrets in my life,” he wrote. “As I have said before, my association with Jeffrey Epstein was a major error of judgement.”Summers was president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. Epstein donated more than $9m to Harvard and its affiliated programs between 1998 and 2008, and was appointed a visiting fellow to conduct research. The university later concluded Epstein “lacked the academic qualifications visiting fellows typically possess and his application proposed a course of study Epstein was unqualified to pursue”.Harvard only stopped accepting Epstein’s donations after he pleaded guilty to child sex offenses in 2008.By then Obama’s star was rising. Summers would eventually win appointment as director of the White House national economic council (NEC) from January 2009 until November 2010.After Summers left the White House, he began asking Epstein for philanthropic advice for his wife, Elisa New, a Harvard professor pursuing a poetry project, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal. Epstein and his foundations made philanthropic donations to projects connected to Summers’s wife, and the two men met a dozen times between 2013 and 2016, often for dinner.After reporting about Epstein’s donations emerged, New’s charity made a donation “in excess” of that received to anti-sex-trafficking organizations, a spokesperson told journalists in 2023. More

    • 175 Shares48 Views

      in US Politics

      AfD hails US ban on European leftwing groups as historians fear crackdown on anti-fascists

      by

      Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland party has welcomed the US government’s decision to classify a prominent German anti-fascist group and three other European networks as terrorist organisations, calling on Berlin and other European governments to follow the example.But historians of anti-fascism warned that at a time when far-right groups were making electoral gains across the continent, the move set a dangerous precedent that could prepare the ground for a broader crackdown on leftwing activism.The US state department announced on Thursday that the ban would apply to Germany’s Antifa Ost, an anti-fascist group whose members have been prosecuted by German authorities for attacks on far-right figures; Italy’s International Revolutionary Front, which sent explosive packages to the then president of the European Commission in 2003; and two organisations accused of planting bombs in Greece: Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense.The AfD has long called for German authorities to make a similar ruling against anti-fascist groups, even before it became the largest opposition in the German parliament earlier this year.“Antifa is a terrorist organisation, and it would be easy for the German state to take action against it, only those in power don’t want to,” said Stephan Brandner, the deputy federal spokesperson for the AfD, accusing the German state of tolerating far-left violence.The designation could result in the freezing of any assets belonging to the groups held in the US and a ban on their members entering the country.Mark Bray, a Rutgers University professor who teaches a course on the history of anti-fascism, said that of the four proscribed groups, only Antifa Ost was an explicitly anti-fascist organisation.“The others are revolutionary groups,” he said. “This shows how the Trump administration is trying to lump all revolutionary and radical groups together under the label ‘antifa’. By establishing the (alleged) existence of foreign antifa groups, the Trump administration seems to be setting the stage for declaring American antifa groups (and all that they deem to be ‘antifa’) to be affiliated with these supposed foreign terrorist groups.”View image in fullscreenThe antifa movement emerged in Germany in the 1920s. But the term is extremely loose and is frequently applied to a variety of leftwing activist groups, whose common denominator is their opposition to fascism.Members of Antifa Ost are accused of attacking a neo-Nazi in Dresden as well as other acts of violence against people perceived as belonging to the far-right scene, including in Hungary, between 2018 and 2023.Six alleged members were charged in Germany in July, and its most prominent member, Maja T, who is non-binary, is being held in custody in Hungary in conditions they have described as inhumane. They face trial in January and have been told they could face up to 23 years in prison.Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence service, which has designated the AfD as a “confirmed rightwing extremist” force, has previously concluded that the antifa “movement” has neither a fixed organisational structure nor any clearly defined hierarchies.The historian Richard Rohrmoser said the name was such a broadbrush term it could be applied not just to “black-clad groups ready for violence” but also to peaceful activist groups from the Anne Frank Center to the White Rose student movement, the Christian-inspired student group that opposed the Nazis in the 1930s.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Trump is pursuing a perfidious tactic,” he told Der Spiegel. “By labelling groups as ‘antifa’, he can ban leftwing groups and demonstrations and crack down on opposition figures as soon as someone is seen wearing an antifa sweatshirt or carrying an antifa flag.” By doing so, he said, he can legitimise any action he takes against “anyone who is, in a broader sense, to his left, or opposed to him”.Italy’s Fai/Fri, or Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front, is a collection of anarchist-insurrectionist cells considered to be the most structured and well established of the European groups designated by the Trump administration. The group, which unlike other Italian anarchist movements expresses itself through violence, was founded in December 2003, when it distributed leaflets claiming responsibility for the explosion of two bins close to the home in Bologna of Romano Prodi, who at the time was president of the European Commission. A few weeks later, a parcel bomb exploded in Prodi’s hands. He was uninjured.Italy’s security services describe Fai/Fri as a “horizontal” movement made up of autonomous cells united by an insurrectionist-anarchist ideology and which uses armed direct action. Other actions include letter bomb attacks in 2010 on the Swiss and Chilean embassies in Rome and the 2021 kneecapping of Roberto Adinolfi, then the chief executive of the nuclear engineering company Ansaldo Nucleare.Mary Bossis, an emiritus professor of international security at the University of Piraeus in Athens, said violence was common on the edges of broad-based social movements. “But that does not mean, as in the case of antifa, that the whole movement is either violent or supportive of terrorism. In fact it is very much not the case … Standing against fascism does not make someone a terrorist.”Greek media reports described the US move as “a dangerous development” at a time when the threat from the right on both sides of the Atlantic was so visibly on the ascendant.After the dismantlement of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, which rose to be Greece’s third biggest party during its near decade-long debt crisis, ultra-nationalist, far-right parties have emerged and been voted into parliament. More

    • 138 Shares56 Views

      in Elections

      Georgia prosecutor to take over last remaining criminal case against Trump

      by

      The only remaining criminal case against Donald Trump has been revived after the head of Georgia’s prosecutor’s council appointed himself to replace Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, who was removed from the election interference case in September.Pete Skandalakis, a Republican and the executive director of the prosecuting attorneys’ council of Georgia, the state body that provides legal training and is often charged to mitigate prosecutorial conflicts, wrote in a statement on Friday that he would be taking over from Willis.A grand jury in Atlanta indicted Trump and 18 others in August 2023, using the state’s anti-racketeering law to accuse them of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally overturn Trump’s narrow 2020 loss to Joe Biden in Georgia. The alleged scheme included Trump’s call to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, urging him to find enough votes to beat Biden.The case remains the only criminal prosecution of Trump, but it has been on life support after Willis was disqualified by the Georgia supreme court, which ruled that her romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, revealed in dramatic court filings in January 2024, created an impermissible appearance of a conflict of interest.Four people have pleaded guilty. Trump and the others have pleaded not guilty. While president, Trump is protected from state-level prosecutions, but the other 14 remaining defendants are still subject to prosecution.“The filing of this appointment reflects my inability to secure another conflict prosecutor to assume responsibility for this case,” Skandalakis said. “Several prosecutors were contacted and, while all were respectful and professional, each declined the appointment.”Fulton county’s courts have called on Skandalakis to resolve a conflict before in this case, after Scott McAfee, Fulton county superior court judge, found that Willis’s office had a conflict of interest with Burt Jones, who served as one of 16 “alternate” GOP electors in Georgia to cast a vote for Trump during the 2020 legal conflict over election results. Skandalakis ultimately declined to press charges in the case against Jones, who is now Georgia’s lieutenant governor and a candidate for governor in 2026.McAfee set a 14 November deadline for Skandalakis to find a new prosecutor on the Trump racketeering indictment to avoid dismissing the case entirely.“While it would have been simple to allow Judge McAfee’s deadline to lapse or to inform the court that no conflict prosecutor could be secured – thereby allowing the case to be dismissed for want of prosecution – I did not believe that to be the right course of action,” Skandalakis said.“The public has a legitimate interest in the outcome of this case. Accordingly, it is important that someone make an informed and transparent determination about how best to proceed.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSkandalakis noted that he did not receive the complete investigative file from Fulton county prosecutors until last week. He appointed himself as prosecutor to “complete a comprehensive review and make an informed decision regarding how best to proceed”.In addition to Trump, Mark Meadows, the president’s former chief of staff, and former New York mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani remain defendants in the case. Trump pardoned Meadows and Giuliani of any federal crime related to the 2020 election, a largely symbolic gesture.Upon receipt of Skandalakis’s letter naming himself as prosecutor, McAfee wasted no time jumping into the case. He immediately scheduled a pretrial status conference for 1 December, asking prosecutors to tell him whether they intend to seek a superseding indictment to continue the case. Later Friday afternoon, he dismissed three of the counts in the case involving forgery and filing of false documents in federal court. More

    • 125 Shares45 Views

      in Elections

      Justice department allegedly investigating debunked 2020 Georgia election fraud claims

      by

      Members of Georgia’s election denial movement have claimed in recent weeks that the justice department is investigating debunked fraud claims in the state stemming from the 2020 election.The development would be just the latest in a series of moves by Trump acolytes at the DoJ who are transforming the voting section of the agency from an office focused on protecting Americans’ voting rights to one that is in lockstep with an election denial movement that incessantly demands investigations and drastic reductions in access to the polls based on Donald Trump’s lies about elections.On 2 October, Republicans from the Georgia legislature invited several election deniers to speak at a hearing designed to help lawmakers decide whether to end the state’s membership in the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, an organization that helps election officials remove ineligible voters from voter rolls.Among those invited was Mark Davis, a political consultant and frequent voter registration challenger. Davis’s presentation was titled “Felony Residency Violations”, and alleged that hundreds of thousands of Georgia voters may have voted illegally in recent elections because they had moved, but had voted in their former jurisdictions.“On September 10th, I received a call from an investigator with the Department of Justice about these specific violations,” Davis claimed.Davis nor the justice department responded to requests for comment.Davis said he had submitted formal complaints about 97 voters to the Georgia secretary of state’s office, adding that they should be investigated for possible violations of the federal Voting Rights Act. His alleged conversation with the justice department “makes these issues even more important”, he said at the hearing.Davis’s revelation marked the second time in recent months that election deniers had claimed the justice department was investigating unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. At the heart of their claims is a 25 August letter from Ed Martin, who defended January 6 rioters and has since been appointed by Trump as an attorney at the DoJ. In the letter, Martin demanded “immediate access” to 148,000 ballots and ballot envelopes from the 2020 election that the state’s election denial movement believes will prove their false claims of a stolen election that year.The letter – whose authenticity the Guardian has not been able to independently verify – was allegedly sent to the judge Robert CI McBurney, who has overseen election-related cases in Georgia. McBurney did not respond to a request for comment; nor did Martin. But on 29 October, Martin posted an emoji denoting intrigue when the letter was posted on X by Cleta Mitchell, head of the Election Integrity Network and one of the nation’s most prominent election conspiracy theorists.“I am requesting your permission to immediately access the approximately 148,000 absentee ballots and envelopes currently being held at the Fulton County ballot warehouse,” Martin wrote in the letter, which has only been shared publicly by Mitchell and an anonymous, far-right X account. “I am at present undertaking an investigation into election integrity here at the Department of Justice. A review of the ballots and envelopes is imperative for this work.”The letter also states that a copy would be sent to the office of Ché Alexander, clerk of the Fulton county superior court. Alexander’s office said it had not received the letter.Martin’s supposed investigation into 2020 election fraud claims offers more evidence that Trump’s justice department is working hand-in-hand with the election denial movement, said Max Flugrath of Fair Fight, a Georgia-based progressive voting rights advocacy organization.“Trump’s DOJ is actively working with the same crackpots who tried to overturn his 2020 loss,” Flugrath said in a statement. “Investigators are reaching out to discredited activists and partisan operatives to advance bogus claims of fraud.”The voting section of the justice department’s civil rights division has taken the lead in pursuing Trump’s lies about election fraud, demanding lists of voters and their personal information from more than 30 states. The DoJ’s potential involvement in unfounded fraud investigations represents a new front in the Trump administration’s pursuit of fraud claims headed into next year’s midterm elections.On 15 October, Donald Trump himself appeared to reference those very ballots in remarks to reporters, falsely claiming that he won the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.“I hope they go into the votes which are being stored in Fulton county and take a real look at those votes, because I won it the second time too,” Trump said.To gain access to full voter registration lists, or “VRLs”, the DoJ has sued seven states, prompting voting rights groups to warn that the Trump administration is helping states to purge hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of Americans from voter rolls heading into next year’s elections.In Texas, the Trump administration’s use of social security and justice department databases has resulted in claims that more than 2,000 voters are non-citizens, who are ineligible to vote in federal elections. A county election official there warned in a 29 October court filing that, in one county, more than a quarter of those identified as noncitizens had already proved their citizenship.The official warned that the use of the databases to identify possible noncitizens could result in large numbers of eligible voters having their ability to vote “improperly cancelled”. After being identified as possible noncitizens by Texas’s Republican secretary of state, 2,724 voters have begun receiving notices that they could have their ability to vote revoked, “in some cases with minimal apparent verification by counties of whether the recipients are actually noncitizens”, the county election official said.Trump’s justice department has demanded unredacted VRLs from at least 30 states, including Georgia. On 7 August, Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger received a demand for unredacted VRLs from the justice department’s civil rights division, the Guardian has learned. The letter, which has not been previously reported, also asked Raffensperger’s office to list election officials throughout the state “who are responsible for implementing Georgia’s general program of voter registration list maintenance”.“Please also provide a description of the steps that you have taken, and when those steps were taken, to ensure that the State’s list maintenance program has been properly carried out in full compliance with the NVRA,” the letter states.The Trump administration has used language in the National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, to claim the federal government should have access to unredacted voter lists.Raffensperger’s office did not respond to a request for comment.A month after Martin’s letter, the state election board’s three Trump-supporting Republican members outvoted the lone Democrat to subpoena the same 148,000 ballot envelopes that Martin’s letter demanded. The subpoena is part of the board’s ongoing work with the justice department, said one of the board’s Republican members, Janelle King.“We sent a letter to the DoJ asking for help, and they are helping,” King said during a 21 October gathering of Republicans in Fannin county. King’s comments have not been previously reported. “Now, you heard President Trump made a comment about Fulton county not too long ago, so that tells me that some stuff is getting up there – they are talking about it. So the plan is, I’m hoping, that the DoJ gets involved, and forces them to hand it over.”Asked by an election denial activist during her remarks whether the state election board was actively talking to the justice department, King smiled and laughed. “Yes, they’re communicating with us.”On 30 October, the justice department sent a letter to Fulton county demanding access to “all records in your possession responsive to the subpoena issued to your office by the State Election Board”.When the Fulton county board of elections met on 7 November to certify the results of the 4 November elections, Republican board member Julie Adams, an election denier who has worked with a variety of conspiracy theorists and organizations tied to Trump, inquired about the 148,000 ballots that are the intense focus of Georgia’s election denial movement.“I’m asking if we have the ballots from 2020,” Adams said as a fellow board member reminded her that the ballots were in McBurney’s possession as part of an ongoing lawsuit. “I just want to be on the record that I’m not obstructing anything from the SEB or the Department of Justice.” More

    • 175 Shares36 Views

      in US Politics

      Republicans are regimented. Democrats are undisciplined. Just look at the shutdown | Robert Reich

      by

      Chuck Schumer couldn’t hold his senators together at a time when their unity and toughness were essential. And at a time when they were winning: most of the public was blaming Republicans for the shutdown, and pressure was growing to reopen the government (flight delays were mounting).Does this mean Schumer should go? Yes.But the issue runs deeper. There’s a fundamental asymmetry at the heart of American politics. Democrats are undisciplined. Republicans are regimented.For as long as I remember, Democrats have danced to their own separate music while Republicans march to a single drummer.That was the story in 1994, when Democrats had control over both chambers of Congress, but Bill Clinton couldn’t get the Democratic Senate to go along with his healthcare plan, on which Clinton spent almost all his political capital.And again in 2002, when most Democratic senators voted for George W Bush’s resolution to use military force against Iraq.It happened under Joe Biden, when Democrats again controlled both chambers but Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema blocked Biden’s agenda.And now, when Senate Democrats finally have some bargaining power to force Republicans to restore expiring healthcare subsidies that could send millions of Americans’ insurance prices soaring next year, what happens? They cave.I don’t want to over-generalize. Of course, Democrats have on occasion shown discipline while Republicans have fought one another bitterly.But overall – and even before Trump – Democrats have tended to cave or come apart when the going gets tough, and Republicans have held firm.Why? Because of a psychological-structural difference between the two parties.Democrats pride themselves on having a “big tent” holding all sorts of conflicting views.Republicans pride themselves on having strong leaders.People who run for office as Democrats are, as a rule, more tolerant of dissent than are people who run for office as Republicans.Modern-day Democrats believe in diversity, E Pluribus. Republicans believe in unity, Unum.Research by the linguist George Lakoff has shown that Democrats represent the nurturing mother in our brains: accepting, embracing, empathic. Republicans represent the strict father: controlling, disciplining, limiting.This asymmetry helps explain why the Democrat’s “brand” has been weak relative to the Republican brand, why Democrats often appear spineless while Republicans appear adamant, and why the Democratic message is often unclear while the Republican message is usually sharper.Even during the shutdown, when Democrats demanded legislation that would reduce healthcare costs next year, polls showed voters still favoring Republicans on the economy and cost of living. Why? Because the Democratic message was so garbled.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionI don’t mean this as either criticism or justification of Democrats. I offer it as an explanation.As the US has grown ever more unequal and contentious, people who identify as Democrats tend to place a high value on the tenets of democracy, in my experience: equal political rights, equal opportunity and the rule of law. That’s unambiguously good.People who identify as Trump Republicans tend to place a high value on the tenets of authoritarianism: order, control and patriarchy. In fact, Trump authoritarianism is the logical endpoint of modern Republicanism.A majority of the current supreme court, composed of Republican appointees, is coming down on the side of order, control and patriarchy – which they justify under the constitutional fiction of a “unified executive” – rather than equal political rights, equal opportunity and the rule of law.None of this lets Chuck Schumer off the hook. He failed to keep Senate Democrats in line at a critical time. And none of what I’ve said exonerates the seven Senate Democrats and one independent who broke ranks to join with the Republicans.The lesson here is not that Democrats should become more authoritarian, especially now, when Trump Republicans are threatening the basic principles of American democracy.The real lesson is that when we – voters who support Democrats in Congress – want them to hang tough, we need to force them to hang tough.Republican voters can pretty much assume their senators and representatives will be unified and tough because that’s what Republicans do: they march to the same drummer (who these days sits in the Oval Office).But Democrats cannot and should not make this assumption. When we want our senators and representatives to be unified and tough, we must let them know in no uncertain terms that we expect them to be unified and tough. We must demand it.And if they’re not, we must hold them accountable.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now More

    • 188 Shares32 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump news at a glance: president faces potentially damaging congressional vote over releasing Epstein files

      by

      Donald Trump is facing the prospect of a politically damaging congressional vote on releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files after attempts to press two female members of Congress to withdraw their backing for it appeared to have failed.The reported refusal of Lauren Boebert, a Republican representative from Colorado, and Nancy Mace, from South Carolina, to remove their names from a discharge petition to force a vote leaves Trump exposed on an issue that carries the possibility of turning segments of his Maga base against him.Boebert reportedly stood firm on supporting the petition after being invited by Trump to the White House in an effort to persuade her to withdraw her signature, according to the New York Times.Trump faces prospect of congressional vote on releasing Epstein filesThe outlet reported that the meeting happened hours after Democrats on the House of Representatives’ oversight committee released a trove of emails from the files that suggested that Trump may have known more about Epstein’s underage sex trafficking activities than he previously acknowledged.The disgraced late financier – who died by suicide in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial – wrote in one email that Trump, his former close friend, “knew about the girls”.The New York Times reported that the White House sought to persuade Boebert to change her mind – enlisting Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and the FBI director, Kash Patel – before issuing “vague threats” when the tactic did not work.The paper, citing people “familiar with her thinking”, reported that the hardline approach had the counterproductive effect of persuading Boebert that there may be a conspiracy to conceal the contents of the files and caused her to dig in.Read the full storyUS justice department joins lawsuit to block California’s new electoral mapThe lawsuit, filed in federal court in California, challenges the congressional map championed by Gavin Newsom, the state’s Democratic governor, in response to a Republican gerrymander in Texas, sought by Donald Trump. The justice department’s intervention in the case sets up a high-profile showdown between the Trump administration and Newsom, one of the president’s chief antagonists and a possible 2028 contender.Read the full storyBBC apologises to Trump over edited speechHowever, the corporation has rejected his demands for compensation, after lawyers for Trump threatened to sue for $1bn (£760m) in damages unless the BBC issued a retraction, apologised and settled with him.The BBC has also agreed not to show the edition of Panorama again.Read the full storyJames Comey and Letitia James to challenge validity of Trump-era chargesJames Comey, the former FBI director, and the New York attorney general, Letitia James, will ask a federal judge on Thursday to drop the criminal charges against them, arguing that Donald Trump’s hand-picked US attorney, who obtained the indictments against them, was unlawfully appointed.The hearing at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia in front of Judge Cameron Currie will mark the first time a judge will consider one of several efforts James and Comey have made to dismiss the indictments before trials.Read the full storyEric Swalwell under federal investigation for alleged mortgage fraudThe Democratic congressman is the latest target of Trump’s retribution campaign against his critics, the congressman confirmed on Thursday.NBC News reports that Swalwell is facing a federal criminal investigation for alleged mortgage fraud, just as three other Democratic officials have faced in recent months. The outlet says the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency sent a letter to the attorney general claiming Swalwell may have committed mortgage and tax fraud.Read the full storyTrump Organization sought to bring in nearly 200 workers on visas in 2025Donald Trump’s family business increased the pace at which it hired foreign workers on temporary visas this year, even as his administration was placing obstacles in the way of other businesses that wanted to do the same, a report published Thursday claimed.According to Forbes, which analyzed data from the US Department of Labor, the Trump Organization sought to bring in at least 184 foreign workers in 2025 for temporary positions at the US president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, two golf clubs and his Virginia winery.Read the full storyDonald Trump to pardon UK billionaire and former Tottenham owner Joe LewisJoe Lewis, the British billionaire and former owner of Tottenham Hotspur FC, is to be pardoned by Donald Trump over a 2024 conviction for his part in a “brazen” insider trading scheme.Lewis, 88, was fined $5m (£3.8m) and given three years of probation by a New York judge last year but was spared jail time after pleading guilty to involvement in a plan that prosecutors said was designed to enrich his friends, lovers and employees.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The New York City mayoral election may be remembered for the remarkable win of a young democratic socialist, but it was also marked by something that is likely to permeate future elections: the use of AI-generated campaign videos.

      The US state department has announced that it will designate four European self-described anti-fascist groups as Foreign Terrorist Organisations, as the Trump administration broadens its campaign against what it portrays as an international wave of leftist violence.

      Wall Street came under pressure on Thursday, enduring its worst day in a month as a sell-off of technology stocks intensified. After an extraordinary rally around hopes for artificial intelligence that propelled global stock markets to record highs, fears that tech firms are now overvalued loom large.

      While Donald Trump’s justice department has downplayed the possibility that other men were involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of teen girls, an email released on 12 November as part of the House oversight committee’s Epstein investigation shows an exchange between the late financier and an associate where they discuss “girls” and travel.

      Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman was hospitalized on Thursday after a heart condition flare-up caused him to fall on his face outside his home.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened Wednesday, 12 November. More

    • 138 Shares52 Views

      in US Politics

      Democrat Eric Swalwell faces federal criminal inquiry for alleged mortgage fraud

      by

      The Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell is the latest target of Trump’s retribution campaign against his critics, the congressman confirmed on Thursday.NBC News reports that Swalwell is facing a federal criminal investigation for alleged mortgage fraud, just as three other Democratic officials have faced in recent months. The outlet says the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency sent a letter to the attorney general claiming Swalwell may have committed mortgage and tax fraud.Swalwell said in a statement: “As the most vocal critic of Donald Trump over the last decade and as the only person who still has a surviving lawsuit against him, the only thing I am surprised about is that it took him this long to come after me.”The move is the latest in Trump’s ongoing retribution campaign, in which he is pushing for criminal charges against his enemies and issuing executive orders that punish those who have worked against him.Trump has gone after the New York attorney general, Leticia James, Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and Senator Adam Schiff, all with claims of mortgage fraud originating from the Federal Housing Finance Agency. He posted on Truth Social a public note of pressure to the attorney general, Pam Bondi, to bring charges against his critics. James has been charged and is fighting the allegations.In separate instances, the former FBI director James Comey was indicted for allegedly making a false statement and obstructing a congressional investigation during a testimony to Congress in 2020, and former national security adviser John Bolton was charged over mishandling classified materials.“Like James Comey and John Bolton, Adam Schiff and Lisa Cook, Letitia James and the dozens more to come – I refuse to live in fear in what was once the freest country in the world,” Swalwell said. “As Mark Twain said, ‘Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.’ Mr. President, do better. Be Better.”The referral to the justice department “alleges several million dollars worth of loans and refinancing based on Swalwell declaring his primary residence as Washington” and says Swalwell should be investigated for a host of potential fraud crimes, according to NBC News. More