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      Bondi spars over Epstein but stays silent on Comey: takeaways from a tense hearing

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      In an often tense hearing before the Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday, the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, stood accused by Democrats of weaponizing the US Department of Justice, “fundamentally transforming” the department, and leaving “an enormous stain on American history” that it will take “decades to recover [from]”.Bondi criticized Democratic lawmakers in personal terms as she faced questions over the department’s enforcement efforts in Democratic-led cities, her mishandling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, and inquiries into Donald Trump’s political adversaries. Here are the key takeaways from Bondi’s appearance.1. Democrats criticized Trump’s weaponization of the justice departmentBondi faced questions about her tenure at the department, as Democratic senators condemned the Trump administration for weaponizing the DoJ to investigate and prosecute Trump’s political enemies.“Our nation’s top law-enforcement agency has become a shield for the president and his political allies when they engage in misconduct,” Dick Durbin said. Durbin called Lindsey Halligan, the new US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, part of a “network of unqualified mega-loyalists masquerading as federal prosecutors”.“Attorney General Bondi: in eight short months, you have fundamentally transformed the justice department and left an enormous stain on American history. It will take decades to recover,” Durbin said.When asked by Amy Klobuchar whether she saw the president’s post on Truth Social, urging her to prosecute his political adversaries such as James Comey and Letitia James, as a “directive”, Bondi evaded the question.“President Trump is the most transparent president in American history,” Bondi said.She refused to “discuss personnel issues”, when Klobuchar asked about Bondi’s reported pushback to the president’s pressure campaign to remove Erik Siebert, Halligan’s predecessor. Bondi also refused to discuss the case against Comey, after Siebert said there was insufficient evidence to prosecute the former FBI director.Adam Schiff said that the department, under Bondi’s leadership, had become Trump’s “personal sword and shield to go after his ever growing list of political enemies and to protect himself, his allies and associates”.Schiff is a noted adversary of the president, and served on the House select committee that investigated the Capitol insurrection. Bondi snapped at him when she refused to answer questions about the allegations against Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, for allegedly accepting $50,000 in bribes before Trump took office: “Deputy attorney general [Todd] Blanche and [FBI] director [Kash] Patel said that there was no evidence that Tom Homan committed a crime, yet now you’re putting his picture up to slander him.“If you worked for me, you would have been fired,” Bondi continued. “Will you apologize to Donald Trump for trying to impeach him?”2. Bondi refused to discuss the arrest of James ComeyIn a line of questioning by Richard Blumenthal, Bondi refused to discuss or disclose any conversations she may have had with the president in the lead-up to the indictment of Comey last month. Blumenthal said Bondi attended a dinner with Donald Trump, just days before the former FBI director was criminally charged.Bondi instead pushed back against the Democratic senator from Connecticut. “I find it so interesting that you didn’t bring any of this up during President Biden’s administration, when he was doing everything to protect Hunter Biden, his son,” she said.3. Bondi and Durbin sparred over EpsteinDurbin grilled Bondi as to why she made a public claim that the Epstein “client list” was “sitting” on her desk for review earlier this year, only to “produce already public information and no client list”.Bondi pushed back, saying she had “yet to review” the documents, and reaffirmed that there was no Epstein client list.Bondi sparred with Durbin, questioning why he “refused repeated Republican requests to release the Epstein flight logs in 2023 and 2024”. Durbin said Bondi’s claims were not accurate.“I did not refuse. One of the senators here wished to produce those logs, and I asked her to put it in writing, and she never did,” Durbin said, apparently referring to his Republican colleague Marsha Blackburn.4. Republicans focused on ‘Arctic Frost’ revelationsPam Bondi said that Operation Arctic Frost – an intelligence-gathering effort that led to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the plot to overturn the results of the 2020 election – was “an unconstitutional, undemocratic abuse of power”.On Monday, several Republican lawmakers said the FBI gathered phone records from Republican senators. These records were obtained through a grand jury. Republicans have called this move part of the wider pattern of political weaponization of the previous administration.“This is the kind of conduct that shattered the American people’s faith in our government,” Bondi said at the hearing. “Our FBI is targeting violent criminals, child predators and other law breakers, not sitting senators who happen to be from the wrong political party.”Republican Josh Hawley also chimed in. “I’ve heard them say that Joe Biden never targeted his political enemies,” he said. “Huh? That’s interesting, because I could have sworn that yesterday we learned that the FBI tapped my phone.”5. Bondi said ‘national guard are on the way to Chicago’In a heated exchange with Durbin, Bondi refused to answer a question about whether she was consulted about Trump’s decision to send national guard troops to Illinois – the state that Durbin represents.“You voted to shut down the government, and you’re sitting here. Our law enforcement officers aren’t being paid. They’re out there working to protect you,” Bondi said, after declining to discuss internal conversations with the White House.“I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump. Currently the national guard are on the way to Chicago. If you’re not going to protect your citizens, President Trump will.” More

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      Six former US surgeons general warn RFK Jr is ‘endangering nation’s health’

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      Six former US surgeons general – the top medical posting in Washington – warned in an opinion column published on Tuesday that policy changes enacted by the health and human services (HHS) secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, are “endangering the health of the nation”.The surgeons general – Jerome Adams, Richard Carmona, Joycelyn Elders, Vivek Murthy, Antonia Novello and David Satcher – who served under both Republican and Democrat administrations, identified changes in vaccine policy, medical research funding, a shift in priorities from rationality to ideology, plunging morale, and changes to staffing as areas of concern.Referring to their oaths of office, both Hippocratic as physicians and as public servants, the former officials wrote in the Washington Post that they felt “compelled to speak with one voice to say that the actions of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are endangering the health of the nation”.“Never before have we issued a joint public warning like this. But the profound, immediate and unprecedented threat that Kennedy’s policies and positions pose to the nation’s health cannot be ignored,” they said, adding that they could not ignore the “profound, immediate and unprecedented threat” of his policies.Under a “Make America Healthy Again” (Maha) agenda, Kennedy has accelerated vaccine policy changes despite opposition from scientists, including narrowing eligibility for Covid-19 vaccine shots and dismissing members of a vaccine advisory panel.He has cut federal funding for mRNA vaccine research for respiratory illnesses and instituted a review of vaccine recommendations. Kennedy also sought the dismissal of Dr Susan Monarez, former head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).Monarez testified before Congress last month that her firing by Donald Trump came after refusing a request from Kennedy to dismiss CDC vaccine experts “without cause”.Kennedy said in June that waning public trust in US healthcare and conflicts of interest between the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry are behind a mission to put “the restoration of public trust above any pro- or anti-vaccine agenda”.“The public must know that unbiased science guides the recommendations from our health agencies. This will ensure the American people receive the safest vaccines possible,” he said.The surgeons general pushed back on that characterization in their letter, noting that they had uniformly “watched with increasing alarm as the foundations of our nation’s public health system have been undermined.“Science and expertise have taken a back seat to ideology and misinformation. Morale has plummeted in our health agencies, and talent is fleeing at a time when we face rising threats – from resurgent infectious diseases to worsening chronic illnesses,” they said.They accused Kennedy of failing to ground public healthcare policy in science, pointing out that Kennedy “has spent decades advancing dangerous and discredited claims about vaccines” and referred to the recent measles outbreak in parts of the US.“Secretary Kennedy is entitled to his views,” the authors concluded. “But he is not entitled to put people’s health at risk. He has rejected science, misled the public and compromised the health of Americans.”Last week, two psychiatric organizations – the Southern California Psychiatric Society and a grassroots startup, the Committee to Protect Public Mental Health – called for Kennedy’s removal as health secretary in a statement, arguing that the HHS had “been damaged in ways that directly endanger lives, degrade scientific integrity, and obstruct effective treatment for mental health and substance use disorders”.The groups pointed to Kennedy’s restructuring of the agency including changes to the substance abuse and mental health services administration (Samhsa), which the secretary plans to place under the control of a new entity, titled the Administration for a Healthy America (AHA).Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for the federal health department, said in a statement to NPR that “Secretary Kennedy remains firmly committed to delivering on President Trump’s promise to Make America Healthy Again by dismantling the failed status quo, restoring public trust in health institutions, and ensuring the transparency, accountability, and decision-making power the American people voted for.” More

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      Virginia governor’s race shaken up by ‘violent’ texts sent by ally of Democratic candidate

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      A series of “violent” texts sent by a Democrat seeking to become Virginia’s attorney general has shaken up the state’s governor’s race, with Republican candidate Winsome Earle-Sears seizing on the controversy to try to reverse her opponent’s double-digit polling lead.Earle-Sears has released new campaign advertisements condemning Democratic former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, her opponenent in the governor’s race, for continuing to support Jay Jones, whose private texts three years ago speculated about a senior state Republican getting “two bullets to the head” and “breeding little fascists”.Jones, a former state lawmaker, has apologized, and Spanberger distanced herself from his remarks, insisting in a statement: “I will always condemn violent language in our politics.”But Earle-Sears, who trailed her opponent by 12 points in a poll for November’s election taken before the texts emerged, said Spanberger and Jones both needed to drop out of their respective races, a view echoed by Donald Trump. The president called Spanberger “weak and ineffective” in a post to his Truth Social platform.“Spanberger’s continuing support for Jay Jones is disqualifying for higher office,” Earle-Sears said at a weekend press conference. “She and her party’s irresponsible behavior have brought us to this point.”The episode comes amid escalating political violence in the US, which in recent months has included the murders of Democratic Minnesota state house speaker Melissa Hortman and the far-right commentator Charlie Kirk – as well as an arson attack on the home of Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro.Trump and his allies have attempted to portray the violence as the exclusive preserve of leftwing agitators, even though a study – removed by the justice department from its website in September – concluded that far-right extremists have killed far more Americans than any other domestic terrorist group.The texts by Jones – who served in the state house from 2018 to 2021 – were sent in August 2022 to a Republican female former colleague. The text referred to Republican Todd Gilbert, the then speaker of the chamber.According to National Review, which first reported the texts Friday, Jones was musing about Gilbert and other Republicans in the wake of the death of Democratic long-serving state politician Joe Johnson Jr, saying he would “piss on their graves” if they died before him.Then he speculated on what he would do if he faced Gilbert and two dictators. “Three people, two bullets. Gilbert, Hitler and Pol Pot. Gilbert gets two bullets to the head,” he wrote. “Spoiler: put Gilbert in the crew with the two worst people you know and he receives both bullets every time.”In a subsequent text, he said Gilbert and his wife, Jennifer, were “evil” – and “breeding little fascists”.The recipient of the messages, Republican state house of delegates member Carrie Coyner, challenged Jones on their content, the National Review said.“What he said was not just disturbing but disqualifying for anyone who wants to seek public office,” she told the outlet in a statement.Her statement also said: “It’s disgusting and unbecoming of any public official.”Jones issued his own statement of apology, accepting “full responsibility for my actions” and stating he had apologized to Gilbert and his wife.“Reading back those words made me sick to my stomach,” he said. “I am embarrassed, ashamed and sorry. I cannot take back what I said; I can only take full accountability and offer my sincere apology.”The Republican attorney general running for re-election against Jones, Jason Miyares, criticized his opponent at a press conference on Saturday. “The attorney general is the chief law enforcement officer of Virginia,” Miyares said. “It must be done with character and integrity. Jay Jones has proven he is reckless, biased, and willing to trade away his integrity. This conduct is disqualifying.”The scandal has put Spanberger on the back foot in a race that she was comfortably winning.“This definitely qualifies as something that breaks through, and not many events do that any more,” Virginia-based Republican strategist Zack Roday said to NBC News. “This is all the campaign is going to be for the next 30 days.” More

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      Alligator Alcatraz snaps back to life after judges’ reprieve of Florida’s migrant jail

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      For two weeks at the end of August. “Alligator Alcatraz”, the harsh immigration jail in the Florida Everglades notorious for allegations of inhumane treatment and due process violations, looked like it was done.A district court judge ruled that its hasty construction in the fragile wetlands breached federal environmental laws, and state officials appeared to be complying with her closure order by shipping out hundreds of detainees and winding down operations.To many observers, the existence of the bleak, remote tented camp looked to have been a dark but brief chapter in the ongoing cruelty of the Trump administration’s broader immigration crackdown that has broken apart families and imprisoned thousands with no criminal record or history.Then two Donald Trump-appointed appeals court judges, one whose husband has close ties to the Republican Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, stepped in. Not only did their pause on Miami judge Kathleen Williams’s order allow DeSantis to keep Alligator Alcatraz open, it seems to have supercharged activities at his flagship detention camp.View image in fullscreen“It’s roared back into action,” said Noelle Damico, the director of social justice at the Workers Circle, an advocacy group that has helped organize vigils attended by hundreds of protesters at the jail every weekend since it opened in early July.Immigration activists who have maintained a near constant presence at the gates say they have witnessed countless buses coming and going as the 3,000-capacity camp rapidly fills up again; attorneys for some of the detainees say Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials are escalating efforts to block access to their clients.The Miami Herald reported that hundreds of Alligator Alcatraz captives, of the estimated 1,800 held there in July ahead of the legal maneuverings, had since “dropped off the grid”.It suggests the site has again become a key hub of a secretive Trump program exposed by a Guardian investigation last month that transfers detainees around the country to other Ice facilities in a kind of “lawless limbo”, or simply deports them without notification to attorneys or family members.“Now it’s back open, this mismanaged state-run facility is essentially operating like a US black site, people are being disappeared, and the cruelty and chaos is by design,” Damico said.“But there’s also a growing awareness that this is an absolute break with everything our nation stands for. Across the country people are saying this is wrong, and we will continue to be here as long as people are being detained at the facility in reprehensible conditions.”Numbers at her group’s Sunday vigils have swelled since the site’s resurgence, she said, and protests against Ice had taken place in other Florida cities, including outside DeSantis’s newly opened “deportation depot” jail in Baker county.The Everglades camp, which was built in eight days in June on a largely disused airstrip 40 miles west of Miami, is the subject of several lawsuits filed by groups seeking its closure. Williams issued her preliminary injunction, stayed by the 11th circuit court of appeal, in an action filed by the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians and an alliance of environmental groups.Williams agreed with their assertions that acres of newly paved roads, installation of hundreds of yards of chain-link fences, and night-time light pollution visible for miles was harmful to the ecologically sensitive land.The appeals court panel, however, found in a 2-1 ruling that because the state had initially used its own money (an estimated $450m) to build it, it could not be considered a US government project and therefore no environmental impact study was required.On Thursday, it was reported that Florida received a $608m reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for Alligator Alcatraz and other Ice-related projects.“This seems to be the smoking gun proving that our lawsuit is entirely correct,” said Elise Bennett, Florida and Caribbean director at the Center for Biological Diversity.“This is a federal project built with federal funds that’s required by federal law to go through a complete environmental review. The Trump administration can’t keep lying through their teeth to the American public at the expense of Florida’s imperiled wildlife.“Our legal system can and should stop this incredibly harmful boondoggle.”Further insight into the resurrection of Alligator Alcatraz came last week in a separate lawsuit in Florida’s middle district, filed on behalf of detainees who say they are being denied meetings with their immigration attorneys in breach of their constitutional rights.Ice requires three business days’ notice to set up a face-to-face meeting, a condition “dramatically more restrictive than at other immigration facilities” the lawsuit states, adding that attorneys often show up to find their clients have been transferred elsewhere “immediately prior to the scheduled visits”.“Some detainees never have the chance to meet with their attorneys,” it said.In testimony sent to the Guardian, the daughter of one undocumented Alligator Alcatraz detainee, who did not want to be named for fear of retaliation, said she was allowed to speak to him only in short phone calls that were monitored.“They are being treated like the worst of the worst. They are treated like animals and have been put in cages like animals,” she said.“They are chained by their hands and their ankles, they shower every three days with reused clothing they all share, and I can’t even imagine the quality and quantity of the food they are given.“They can’t even tell what time of day it is. Actual criminals are receiving better treatment than the humans trapped in this place.”Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the homeland security department, denied any mistreatment of detainees in a statement that insisted all allegations to the contrary were “hoaxes”.“Alligator Alcatraz does meet federal detention standards,” she said.In additional comments last month following the Guardian’s findings of due process violations, previously unreported accounts of neglect and abuse, and documented health emergencies, McLaughlin said: “Any claim that there are inhumane conditions at Ice detention centers are false. Ice has higher detention standards than most US prisons that hold actual US citizens.“All detainees are provided with proper meals, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with lawyers and their family members.”Tessa Petit, the executive director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, said the revival of Alligator Alcatraz followed a pattern.“We’ve seen it in the history of not only DeSantis, but also the Trump administration. They start something, they make mistakes, we win [in court], then they come back harder and stronger,” she said.“Now they are more emboldened and empowered to just do what they’re doing, because it feels like they have more of the federal government support. So there’s no more shame in doing the wrong thing, no more shame in disappearing people.“We’re seeing that they’re learning, and we’re seeing the same thing happening in Baker. Nobody can tell us how many people are in both detention facilities, the families are hearing from their family members only once they’ve been deported, and lawyers still don’t have access to their clients.”Petit added that the camp’s comeback had effectively chilled dissent.“People are more and more afraid to reveal what is going on, and those who are being detained are also afraid to speak up,” she said. “They’ve feared them into silence.” More

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      US universities must reject Trump’s ‘compact’. It is full of traps | Jan-Werner Müller

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      Sticks are bad, but sometimes corruption through carrots is worse. The Trump administration – after having brutally cut federal funding earlier this year – is now trying to make nine universities an offer that they seemingly cannot refuse. In exchange for preferential treatment in funding and bonuses like “invitations to White House events” – apparently the same logic as a fancy credit card that promises you backstage access at concerts – the universities are expected to sign a “compact” with the government. All nine institutions must reject this proposal: it is a thinly veiled attack on academic freedom; it is a test case for whether Trumpists can get away with demanding loyalty oaths; it exceeds the president’s powers to begin with; and it is bound to achieve the opposite of its stated goal of “academic excellence in higher education” (as opposed to what kind of excellence in education, one is tempted to ask).Some features of the compact might look reasonable at first sight. No one is against addressing ever-rising tuition fees (never mind that the Republican party at the same time is capping federal loan programs and shoveling money to high-cost private lenders). And some might welcome the Stephen Miller-lite version of xenophobia: capping the number of foreign students at 15% and forcing foreigners to take American “civics” (it is unclear who would decide the content of lessons “about how great our country is”).But the document also functions as a kind of rap sheet for institutions portrayed as single-mindedly focused on discriminating against white males. Formulations such as “signatories shall adopt policies prohibiting incitement to violence” would make one believe that, as of now, universities encourage terrorist agitators to run rampant on campus; the demand to “transform or abolish institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas” suggests that, as of now, anyone saying the wrong thing about abortion is beaten up by progressive vigilantes (never mind the question what it means to treat an idea as such “violently”).It is no small irony that one of the strategists of the assault on higher education, May Mailman, charges universities with having committed to a “culture of victimhood” in an interview with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat; obviously, it is the Trumpist grievance-industrial complex which mass-produces resentment among supposed “real Americans” held down by nefarious liberal elites. For all the talk of fostering open debate, the goal appears to be the creation of safe spaces for the fragile egos of Maga students suffering from universities’ supposed culture of “negativity”.The clearest attack on academic freedom consists in the demand to ensure “a broad spectrum of viewpoints … within every field, department, school, and teaching unit”. Faculty, students “and staff at all levels” will first have to be tested for ideology; once “empirical assessments” have been completed, the diversity of viewpoints judged appropriate will have to be engineered, presumably by a bureaucracy that can also guarantee consistent viewpoints over time (for what if our new conservative colleague starts to hold different views?). In theory, the result would not just be affirmative action for the right, but forcing the economics department to employ Marxists.To be sure, some Trumpists themselves insist that the government should not be in the business of micromanaging the distribution of political attitudes. But the rejection is not a principled one centered on a proper understanding of academic freedom. It is simply the fear of setting a precedent with what they openly call “policing” and one fine day having the Democrats flood universities with leftists.As with other aspects of Donald Trump’s emerging mafia state, there is no guarantee that those bending the knee will not be bullied again. The government can always come back to universities and accuse them of having violated the agreement (still too many courses in victimhood studies; still too much “violence” – as defined by bureaucrats – vis-a-vis someone’s cherished ideas). The government will also encourage donors to claim back their cash. Since the compact’s criteria are exceedingly vague, those who take the offer will probably overdo compliance.At the risk of sounding like one of those dreadful self-styled victims: universities are fragile institutions. Many American ones are excellent precisely because people trust each other and cooperate successfully without over-regulation (some Europeans can tell you what it means to be subject to constant assessments – and how a Soviet-style bureaucracy constantly distracts from research and teaching). Of course there is always plenty of academic infighting, but what the Trumpists are doing is consciously trying to create divisions by setting potential Trump administration collaborators against those determined to resist it. As has become apparent with other autocrats’ assaults on universities, even if institutions escape (sometimes literally, as they have to relocate to other countries) the worst, much damage has been done. This is why the nine universities should not only reject the compact, but also publicly explain what is wrong with it (otherwise they will be immediately charged with wanting to protect their tuition-racket, helping foreigners and “importing radicalism” to undermine American greatness).Precisely because they have been losing court cases over free speech and visas for foreign students, Trumpists now seek to entrap universities in a deal that effectively removes the protections of federal law and gives the administration arbitrary power over them. The carrots serve to lure institutions of higher learning into a dark alley where, rather than just waiting with a big stick, the government can put a gun to their heads at any time.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University More

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      Trump threatens to invoke Insurrection Act as Bondi faces Senate – US politics live

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      Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of US politics as Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy more troops into Democrat-led cities.“We have an insurrection act for a reason. If I had to enact it I would do that,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, adding, “if people were being killed and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure I would do that.”It came after a federal judge in Oregon temporarily halted a National Guard deployment in Portland although troops from Texas could be deployed in Chicago as soon as today despite a lawsuit from Illinois against the move.Meanwhile, Pam Bondi is likely to grilled over troop deployments as she faces the Senate judiciary committee. The attorney general is also likely to face questions over the indictment last month of the former FBI director James Comey, deadly strikes on boats believed to be carrying drugs off the coast of Venezuela, as well as the brewing controversy over the release of documents related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.Trump is also due to welcome the Canadian PM, Mark Carney, to the White House with trade talks expected to be the main focus of discussions.Later, he will meet American-Israeli former hostage Edan Alexander as the world marks the two-year anniversary of the 7 October attacks. In Egypt, indirect talks are taking place between Israel and Hamas over Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza.And, of course, this all comes amid the backdrop of the ongoing government shutdown, now entering its second week. Stay with us for all the latest developments.In other news:

      A career federal prosecutor in Virginia has told colleagues she does not believe there is probable cause to file criminal mortgage fraud charges against New York attorney general Letitia James, according to a person familiar with the matter. The prosecutor, Elizabeth Yusi, oversees major criminal cases in the Norfolk office for the US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia and plans to soon present her conclusion to Lindsey Halligan, a Trump ally, who was installed as the US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia last month.

      The US supreme court has declined to hear an appeal from Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell of her sex trafficking conviction. Maxwell in 2022 was sentenced to 20 years in prison for sex trafficking and related crimes.

      The Trump administration said that funds from a US government program that subsidizes commercial air service to rural airports are set to expire as soon as Sunday because of the government shutdown.

      Jimmy Kimmel emerged as more popular than Donald Trump after a spat with the president’s administration temporarily left the talkshow host off the air in September, according to a recent poll.

      Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has urged Donald Trump to scrap tariffs on his country’s imports and sanctions against its officials, as the two men held what the Brazilian presidency called a “friendly” video call. More

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      Venezuela on edge over Trump regime change whispers: ‘If it does happen we are ready’

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      The mayor of Caracas had come to one of her city’s busiest tube stations wearing a camouflage T-shirt declaring herself a card-carrying combatant – and with a message to match.“They think they’re the owners of the world,” Carmen Meléndez complained of the Trump administration and its pressure campaign against Venezuela’s government. “But if they dare [to invade] we’ll be waiting for them here.”Meléndez said she hoped a US invasion was not on the horizon, even though they had shown themselves to be “a bunch of crazies, who are capable of anything”. “But if it does happen we are ready,” she added, “and we will use all of the weapons we have to defend the homeland.”Mayor Meléndez was at La Rinconada station to supervise an early morning drill: a practice response to fictitious cyberattack on the Caracas underground that had brought its trains to a halt.The rehearse evacuation, ordered by President Nicolás Maduro as part of a nationwide “civil protection and preparation of the people” exercise, came as Donald Trump turned the heat up on Venezuela’s leader to levels rarely seen before.Since early August, when Trump signed a secret directive authorizing military action against Latin America drug cartels, the US president has labelled Maduro a “narco-terrorist” fugitive and advertised a $50m reward for his arrest; deployed marines and warships off Venezuela’s Caribbean coast; and ordered at least four deadly strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats which have killed at least 21.Last week Trump again upped the ante, declaring a “non-international armed conflict” against drug cartels whose members were now considered “unlawful combatants”.View image in fullscreenWashington has justified its strikes as part of a crackdown on Venezuelan narco-traffickers who the US accuses of flooding its streets with drugs, supposedly at Maduro’s behest. “They’re the enemies of all humanity,” Trump told the UN last month, vowing to blow such “terrorist thugs … out of existence”.But many observers suspect Trump’s counter-narcotics crusade is really a pretext to depose Maduro, either by sparking an internal rebellion against Hugo Chávez’s authoritarian heir or perhaps through direct military intervention within Venezuela itself.Speaking to the New York Times last month, Venezuela’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, said she was convinced one of Trump’s “strategic objectives” was “what they call ‘regime change’”. “We will never handover our homeland!” Rodríguez vowed as she announced that Maduro would declare a state of emergency in the event of a US attack.Rodríguez and Meléndez are not the only Maduro allies talking tough in the face of US pressure. One recent evening, the interior minister Diosdado Cabello, appeared on television clutching a heavily annotated copy of a book about the “military thinking” of the Vietnamese revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh. The message was clear: any attempt to topple Maduro’s regime would suck US troops into a bloody quagmire such as the one that unfolded in Southeast Asia in the 60s and 70s, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and nearly 60,000 American soldiers.Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based analyst for Crisis Group, doubted Trump had immediate plans to target Fort Tiuna, the military base where Maduro is thought to live.But Gunson did think Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June had left Venezuela’s leaders genuinely alarmed. In a recent letter to Trump, Maduro tried to defuse the situation, writing: “I respectfully invite you, President, to promote peace through constructive dialogue and mutual understanding throughout the hemisphere.”View image in fullscreen“What Trump did to Iran was a wake up call to the people in government here,” said Gunson. “A lot of analysts thought that wasn’t going to happen … But they did it – and the Iranians had no response. And I think that that was quite sobering for the Chavistas.”The idea of a US intervention is music to the ears of some of Maduro’s political foes, who are desperate to end his 12-year rule during which Venezuela’s economy and democracy have crumbled and millions have fled abroad.In a recent interview, the prominent conservative politician María Corina Machado – whose ally, Edmundo González, is widely believed to have beaten Maduro in last year’s election – hailed Trump’s “visionary” stance. “I totally support his strategy … I’m in favour of the US dismantling this criminal structure,” Machado, who is in hiding in Venezuela, told the Sunday Times.The exiled opposition leader Leopoldo López has said their movement supports “any scenario that helps us transition to democracy”.Robert Evan Ellis, a Latin America specialist who advised the state department on Venezuela policy during Trump’s first administration, saw a “50-50” chance of the opposition’s wish coming true.Trump’s failure to unseat Maduro with a “maximum pressure” campaign during his first term, made it more likely the US president would try to finish the job now, Evan Ellis said. “I think there’s … a certain determination not to essentially feel that he loses this time around as well – so I think that creates incentive,” he said.After the Caribbean boat strikes, Evan Ellis anticipated a “graduated escalation” of US pressure – perhaps air strikes against “narco-planes” or “narco-leaders” on Venezuelan soil: “You don’t just unnecessarily jump from blowing up a couple of ships to pulling the trigger on a major air-land campaign.”View image in fullscreenBut Evan Ellis did not rule out a large-scale “multi-pronged attack”, involving F-35 fighter jets destroying Venezuela’s aerial defences before troops “grab[bed] Maduro wherever he is, based on probably good insider intelligence” and took him to the US. On Thursday, Venezuela’s defence minister, Vladimir Padrino López, said five US “combat aircraft” had been detected flying off his country’s coast.Four days later, on Monday, another key Maduro ally, the national assembly president, Jorge Rodríguez, announced that he had informed US and European authorities of plans for an alleged “false flag operation” attack on the US embassy in Caracas. Rodríguez claimed right-wing extremists had been plotting to target the building with “lethal explosives”.The prospect of a US intervention fills many Venezuelans – even those opposed to Maduro – with dread. “If there’s a war, what will we do?” said Naide González, 58, a cleaner from 23 de Enero, a working class community in Caracas long considered a stronghold of Chavismo.In a recent Guardian interview, Juan González, the White House’s top Latin America official under Joe Biden, called Trump’s military buildup “political theatre” designed to convince Maga voters that he was taking a hard line on drugs and migrants coming from South America. But González feared that if Maduro was deposed, the US could stumble into a protracted guerrilla war, involving a variety of armed groups including government-linked paramilitaries, criminal organizations and Colombian rebels from the National Liberation Army (ELN).“The conditions are ripe here for some kind of protracted low-intensity conflict, if the US gets it wrong – which they may well,” Gunson warned. “This country is absolutely packed from end to end with armed groups of various kinds, none of whom has any incentive to just surrender or stop doing what they’re doing.”David Smilde, a Tulane University Venezuela specialist, said neoconservative Trump officials and hard-line members of Venezuela’s opposition seemed convinced by the “absolutely absurd” idea that Maduro was “hanging on by threads” and that regime change could be achieved “with just a few limited strikes”.“This is the mentality that thought that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a house of cards and Iraq would be a cakewalk once you got rid of Saddam Hussein or took Baghdad,” Smilde added.At La Rinconada, government supporters vowed to resist any foreign intervention as commuters streamed out of the underground into a sunny Caracas morning.Amelia Contreras, a 68-year-old seamstress who is part of Maduro’s Bolivarian militia volunteer group, said she had been receiving first aid and firearms training in preparation for a possible attack. In the event of an incursion, Contreras had been tasked with defending Caracas’s electricity pylons. “We don’t want anyone coming along and interfering here – we won’t allow it,” she said.Kristian Laborín, a 48-year-old member of Maduro’s socialist party, had spent the last three Saturdays undergoing military training but still hoped the US would recoil. “President Trump, there’s still time for us to continue building friendly ties between our peoples,” Laborín said.But if the US president insisted on attacking, Laborín’s comrades would have no choice but to fight back. Parroting a government propaganda line, he said: “You’d be talking about a Hundred Years’ War!” More