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    Hunter Biden pleads guilty in tax case after day of back and forth

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    Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to tax charges in federal court in Los Angeles on Thursday, after a day of legal wrangling and in a dramatic move that will avoid a potentially embarrassing trial for Joe Biden’s son.Biden, 54, pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges on a day of courtroom twists and turns, after prosecutors earlier objected to his surprise intention to enter an “Alford” plea, an unusual legal maneuver where a defendant pleads guilty but does not acknowledge wrongdoing. Following prosecutors’ objections, lawyers said Biden was ready to change course and enter an “open” plea, where a defendant pleads guilty to the charges and leaves his sentencing fate in the hands of the judge.In court on Thursday afternoon, Abbe Lowell, Biden’s attorney, told Judge Mark Scarsi: “Mr Biden will agree that the elements of each offense have been satisfied.”Biden quickly responded “guilty” as the judge read out each of the nine counts. The charges carry up to 17 years in prison, but federal sentencing guidelines are likely to call for a much shorter sentence.A sentencing hearing has been set for 16 December.The president’s only surviving son had previously pleaded not guilty. The surprise back-and-forth unfolded on Thursday morning as Biden entered a Los Angeles courthouse for the start of his tax-avoidance trial.After learning of Biden’s earlier plan to enter an Alford plea, US justice department prosecutors said that would not be acceptable. Alford pleas are usually negotiated in advance, because prosecutors must get high-level approval before agreeing to them.“It’s not clear to us what they are trying to do,” one prosecutor told Scarsi, the judge overseeing the case.“[Hunter Biden] is not entitled to plead guilty on special terms that apply only to him,” said prosecutor Leo Wise. “Hunter Biden is not innocent. Hunter Biden is guilty.”A trial, in the run-up to the November presidential election, could air embarrassing details of the younger Biden’s life. A defense attorney for Biden, Abbe Lowell, told the judge that the evidence against his client is “overwhelming” and that he wanted to resolve the case.The son of the president stands accused of failing to pay his taxes on time from 2016 to 2019, as well as two felony counts of filing a false return and an additional felony count of tax evasion.Hunter Biden walked into the courtroom for jury selection on Thursday morning holding hands with his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, and flanked by Secret Service agents. Initially, he pleaded not guilty to the charges related to his taxes from 2016 to 2019 and his attorneys had indicated they would argue he did not act “willfully”, or with the intention to break the law, in part because of his well-documented struggles with alcohol and drug addiction.A guilty plea will head off a weeks-long trial that would mark the second time in three months that the younger Biden sits in a federal courtroom as a jury of his peers is assembled to assess whether he is guilty of a slew of criminal charges.Hunter Biden was found guilty in Delaware on three felony counts relating to his purchase of a handgun in 2018 because he wrote on his gun-purchase form, falsely, that he was not a user of illicit drugs. The new trial takes place in the city where Biden has lived for years and where, according to the prosecution, he spent extensively on “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes”.The most serious charges relate to his 2018 return on which, according to the prosecution, he sought to claim his children’s college tuition fees and more than $27,000 in online pornography as business expenses.The tax charges and the gun charges carry maximum sentences of more than 20 years in prison, although legal experts say that, as a first-time offender, Biden is likely to be punished far less harshly even if he were to be found guilty a second time.It has been a whirlwind of a summer for Joe Biden’s son, one in which he was convicted of felonies, rushed to Washington as pressure mounted on his father not to run for re-election, raised eyebrows by dropping into White House meetings – and, according to one report, acting as his father’s “gatekeeper” – then appeared on stage at the Democratic national convention to bask in his father’s reflected glory.Now that Joe Biden has abandoned his re-election ambitions and thrown his support behind his vice-president, Kamala Harris, the political stakes of Hunter Biden’s latest trial will be lower. Still, his legal troubles will take some of the sting out of Donald Trump’s constant complaints that he is the target of a political witch-hunt and that the president has “weaponized” the justice system against him.After Hunter Biden’s June conviction, Joe and Jill Biden issued a statement saying they would respect the judicial process and not consider a pardon for their son. The first lady attended court in Delaware most days, but it is not clear whether she would do the same in California. More

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      Hunter Biden tax trial: less politically fraught, but set to be just as lurid

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      Hunter Biden may not be the political football he was when his father, Joe Biden, was still running for re-election as president, but he will be under a bright spotlight as he faces multiple counts of tax fraud and tax evasion in Los Angeles this week and, if found guilty, risks as long as 22 years behind bars.The case is likely to delve into all the lurid details of the younger Biden’s life – the millions he earned from lucrative foreign consultancies, his string of broken relationships and high-living Hollywood lifestyle, his crack cocaine addiction and the tens of thousands he spent on online pornography – that, not so long ago, had partisan Republicans chomping at the opportunity to inflict political damage on the incumbent in the Oval Office.Now, though, the political optics may be quite different since this trial, coming on top of an earlier one in June in which Hunter Biden was found guilty on a federal gun charge, will probably undermine the argument pushed by the former president Donald Trump and others that the Biden administration has politicized and “weaponized” the justice department to go after its enemies.It is even possible that the Hunter Biden trial will coincide with Trump’s sentencing in the first of his criminal trials in New York state, in which the former president was found guilty in May of 34 counts of falsifying records to cover up a sexual encounter he had with the adult film star Stormy Daniels. That sentencing has been set for 18 September, and if that date holds – the overlap with the Hunter Biden trial will only blunt Trump’s habitual rhetoric about being the victim of a rigged system, with Joe Biden as its mastermind.“So much for weaponization,” the former federal prosecutor Michael Zeldin told CNN after Hunter Biden’s last trial. “This is a testament to the fact that the justice department … is trying its very best to steer straight down the middle.”In Los Angeles, Hunter Biden will face nine charges stemming from his failure to file four years’ worth of taxes on time, including two felony counts of filing a false return and an additional felony count of tax evasion.The narrative presented by federal prosecutors in their indictment would make uneasy reading for any defendant, much less the son of a sitting president. Biden, the prosecutors allege, failed to file his taxes on time from 2016 to 2019, despite earning millions of dollars from his consultancy work with the Ukrainian industrial conglomerate Burisma and a Chinese private equity firm.When he did eventually file his 2018 return, the indictment further alleges, he mischaracterized personal expenditures as business deductions, including college tuition fees for his children and more than $27,000 that he spent on online pornography.Biden cannot legitimately plead financial hardship, prosecutors say, because he was earning more than enough to meet his tax obligations and because a well-connected Hollywood entertainment lawyer named Kevin Morris, referred to in the indictment as “personal friend”, spotted him $1.2m, which he spent on a lavish rental property near Venice Beach, a Porsche and other items.“Between 2016 and October 15, 2020,” the indictment goes on, “the Defendant spent [his] money on drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes.”In pre-trial hearings, Biden’s defense team has not challenged the facts of what paperwork he filed and what payments he made when. Rather, they appear poised to make an argument about diminished responsibility, pointing to his drug addiction during the years under scrutiny and seeking to explain it as a result of trauma going all the way back to Hunter Biden’s childhood, when his mother and sister were killed in a car crash.“They [the prosecution] are creating a portrait for the jury of someone who was plopped down in West Hollywood and decided to just party and do cocaine as if he didn’t have a care in the world,” Biden’s lead counsel, the celebrity lawyer Mark Geragos, complained in court last month. Out of context, Geragos argued, such a depiction was “a form of character assassination” and a deliberate attempt by the prosecution to make his client “look bad”.The judge, Mark Scarsi, gave such arguments short shrift, denying Geragos’s request to introduce evidence about his client’s childhood and warning him that violating this ruling could lead to “six-figure sanctions”. “I don’t know if there’s any good evidence as to what causes addiction,” Scarsi said. “Why is the cause of Mr Biden’s addiction relevant?”The prosecution made a similar point. “No matter how many drugs you take,” the assistant US attorney Leo Wise said, “you don’t suddenly forget that when you make $11m, you have to pay taxes.”Unlike the gun trial in Delaware in June, this case will probably revive controversy over Hunter Biden’s business connections – since they account for his high salary – and the question, which Republicans have been pushing hard for years, of whether he owed these connections to his family’s name and influence.In a report concluding an abortive attempt to bring impeachment charges against Joe Biden, Republican House representatives claimed once again last week that Hunter Biden had taken advantage of his father’s position as vice-president under Barack Obama to obtain “favorable outcomes in foreign business dealings and legal proceedings”.The allegation about foreign business dealings may still sting, even if it no longer has the same potency now that Biden has stepped aside as the Democratic nominee in favor of Kamala Harris. The allegation about legal proceedings, meanwhile, might be short-lived if the jury returns the second guilty verdict against Hunter Biden in four months.Jury selection begins on Thursday, with opening arguments expected on Monday 9 September. Lawyers for both sides have said the trial is likely to last about two weeks. More

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      The evolution of Kamala Harris: from activist in pigtails to presidential candidate

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      View image in fullscreenIt was the first week of July. News of the presidential election had been mired, for eight days, in alarming assessments of Joe Biden and that shambolic debate. The president had started but not finished sentences, slurred words and at points stood with his mouth slightly agape while his opponent, Donald Trump, ignored questions and lied without fact-check.Now, on 6 July, inside New Orleans’s convention center, the 30th annual Essence Festival of Culture was under way. Kamala Harris was set to speak, one of the vice-president’s biggest in-person events since Biden’s performance had seemingly upended the race. The attendees – mostly Black women, drawn to this long-running music-festival-meets-women’s-expo – were waiting to see Harris. Some were chattering about the possibilities: did her future lie at the top of the Democratic party’s ticket? What could, or should, happen next? The press corps now trailing Harris had swelled in size, and began to scribble notes and scramble for a look as Harris walked across the stage as the defiant second chorus of Beyoncé’s Freedom boomed. A rousing cheer came from the standing-room-only crowd in the cavernous, 600-seat room.“Who is Kamala Harris?” Caroline Wanga, the CEO and president of Essence Ventures asked, as she began a “Chief to Chief” conversation, the live version of an interview published each month in Essence, the Black women’s magazine. The conversations are supposed to illuminate what makes the subjects human, their struggles and lessons learned, the moments of victory and defeat and what distinguishes Black women who lead.“The vice-president of the United States,” Harris responded, setting off another extended cheer from the crowd. “I am a wife. We have children. I am a god-mommy. I am an auntie. I am a best friend. I am a good cook … and you know, I am a fighter for people. I am prepared to fight.”Until late July, Harris had been the running mate of the oldest man to seek the presidency. Today, Harris, the nation’s first Black and south Asian and female vice-president, who was once characterized as a public official struggling to find her footing, is a presidential candidate with a narrow lead. When the big change happened – not by death but by swelling doubt – Harris appeared to have surprised all but those who have long known her.People who know Harris well say what the US is witnessing is the confidence, charisma and net effect of practical experience at multiple levels of government, a woman raised to work hard, to operate with compassion and to push past the comfortable toward what is necessary and right. That’s always been there, but it was, perhaps, not always grasped by the public or press. Harris, friends and mentors say, was subjected to constant and unusual forms of scrutiny and given a series of particularly complex, intractable tasks that no one could wrap in a single term as vice-president.What is indisputable is that Harris is a woman running for the nation’s highest office at a moment when democracy is at stake. Her candidacy is historic, and the next few weeks leading up to the presidential election will alter the course of American politics for better or worse.‘She was at marches in a stroller’“She’s always been a go-getter,” said Areva Martin, a CNN legal analyst and lawyer who first met Harris in the late 1980s. Martin, then a student at the University of Chicago, was visiting her brother, a student at Howard University in Washington DC, where Harris was also enrolled, when the two first connected. The women hit it off and have remained friends. “She’s always had a lot of confidence and a concept that anything that wasn’t right, that wasn’t working, was hers to try and change,” Martin said. “If you hear her talking about growing up with her parents, who were very active in the civil rights movement, it’s in her DNA. She was at marches in a stroller.”Born in October 1964, Harris is the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother who met as graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. The Harrises were committed civil rights activists during a time of radical political thought and activity and also, respectively, an economist and a breast cancer researcher. Harris was a toddler when Donald Harris’s academic career forced the family to decamp to Illinois, where Harris’s younger sister, Maya, was born. When Harris’s parents split up in the early 1970s, Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, moved Kamala and Maya back to Berkeley. The girls were raised with direct engagement with two cultures and a firm grounding in the realities of race in the United States. There were trips to an area Hindu temple, and lots of south Indian food which, with a few spice changes, Gopalan would often make into soul food.At home, there were ample amounts of gospel music, which Gopalan, a singer, loved. The Harris girls also went with a neighbor to a Black church and sang in the children’s choir. During summers with their dad, there was lots of jazz. Gopalan, for her part, counted writers and activists among her closest friends. “My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters,” Harris wrote in her 2019 book, The Truths We Hold. “She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls and she was determined to make sure that we would grow into confident, proud Black women.” (Harris’s staff declined to make Harris available for this story.)View image in fullscreenGopalan and the girls lived in a Black neighborhood, and the children were bussed along with other Black students to a white school in another part of town as part of the school district’s integration plan. Harris was a civil rights foot soldier in pigtails. Later, at Howard University – widely considered the nation’s premier institution of all the historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) – Harris encountered so many Black people with different interests, class backgrounds, experiences and cultures that, she wrote in her book, she felt like she was in heaven. She was one of at least two Kamalas on campus.Harris, then fond of popped collars and her short natural curls, studied political science and economics. Yearbooks show she was active in the California Student Association and the debate team and chaired the economics society. It was at Howard where she ran for her first office: freshman class representative. She had a summer gig at McDonald’s, as well as internships with a US senator and at the Federal Trade Commission. At the National Archives, where the original Declaration of Independence, constitution and Bill of Rights as well as every administration’s papers are held, the country’s future first female vice-president was on research. And while working as a tour guide at the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Harris got her first official code name: “TG-10” for “tour guide No 10”.Then there was Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc, one of the nine Black sororities and fraternities, which Harris joined while she was an undergraduate. The groups were founded during the early 20th century so that a select group of college-educated Black Americans might have networks through which they could access jobs, loans, business deals, healthcare and even a safe place to stay. The Divine Nine, as the collective is called, were countervailing forces in a segregated country where the social order planted white Americans at the top and was often enforced by violence.Being an AKA has been a way for Harris to embrace self-affirming merriment and matters of global significance. “On Fridays, my friends and I would dress up in our best clothes and peacock around the Yard,” she wrote in her book. “On weekends, we went down to the National Mall to protest apartheid in South Africa.”“She’s just always been a force,” said Inez Brown, who pledged AKA with Harris in the spring of 1986. “I always said, Kamala is going to be a supreme court justice, because once I knew she was headed for law school, I was like she is going to do something really different. That was just her energy.”When Maya gave birth to a daughter at 17, Harris went back home to California for law school, opting for the state university system’s oldest law school, then known as the University of California, Hastings College of the Law (or UC Hastings, now UC Law San Francisco). When Harris was a student there, she and her mother helped to care for her niece, so that Maya could graduate from the University of California, Berkeley and then Stanford Law School on time.In law school, Harris led the Black Law Students Association and was among an early, small group of Black students who spoke of wanting to become prosecutors, said Shauna Marshall, a semi-retired professor at the law school and co-director of its Center for Racial and Economic Justice. Marshall has known Harris since the early 1990s. While Harris was in law school, she and a few other students had begun to understand a district attorney’s powerful decision-making authority – who should be charged, if at all, with what, and how long a judge should be asked to jail those convicted – and wanted it applied more fairly.“I think both of their career choices came directly from their mother’s activism,” Marshall said about the Harris sisters.In 1988, Harris took an internship in the Alameda county district attorney’s office, the place where the supreme court justice Earl Warren – a chief justice whose court transformed the nation, vastly expanding civil rights and liberties to millions of Americans – had been chief prosecutor. She was one of a handful of Black lawyers in the office. It was the height of the crack epidemic, and Harris managed to convince a court to free a woman wrongly arrested in a drug raid. But, like 40% of people who took the California bar exam the next summer, Harris failed. She passed on her second try in 1990 and joined the Alameda prosecutor’s staff, specializing in the prosecution of sex crimes.In a 2019 speech, Harris told the South Carolina NAACP that when it was time to decide what type of lawyer she would be, her family gathered for a conversation. They wanted to know: “Kamala, what are you going to do in your fight for justice?” Explaining why she wanted to be a prosecutor to that group was a bit like defending a thesis, she said.“I know and I knew then prosecutors have not always done the work of justice,” Harris said. “There have been prosecutors who refused to seat Black jurors, refused to prosecute lynchings, disproportionately condemned Black men to death row and looked the other way in the face of police brutality.” But, Harris said, like other lawyers she admired, she decided to “believe in what can be, unburdened by what has been”.There have been moments that convinced her it was the right choice. Once inside the Alameda county prosecutor’s office, Harris was one of a handful of Black prosecutors. One day, she overheard white colleagues chatting in the hall about how to prove that defendants had been in gangs to apply longer sentences. The conversation was riddled with assumptions and stereotypes. One person suggested looking at the person’s neighborhood. Another suggested the truth was in a defendant’s clothes or music. Harris interrupted: the neighborhood they had discussed was one where she had friends and family. The clothes they described were considered stylish. The music, well, she had that on a tape in her car outside.From district attorney to state attorney generalAfter nearly a decade, Harris was recruited to run the career criminal unit in the San Francisco district attorney’s office, focused on violent and repeat criminals, and was responsible for many of the cases whose outcomes were shaped by California’s contribution to the “tough on crime” era – actions states were incentivized to take under a 1994 federal crime bill brokered by then senator Joe Biden.California’s “three strikes” law and federal money to build more prisons made anyone convicted of three felony crimes, even non-violent offenses, eligible for a life sentence. Harris was among those in the San Francisco district attorney’s office who pushed the agency to seek third-strike treatment only if the felonies involved were serious or violent crimes. But the issue and the racial disparities it deepened were bigger than any one prosecutor or DAs office. Today, the Vera Institute for Justice describes California as “one of the epicenters of mass incarceration in the United States, incarcerating more people than any other state except Texas”.Harris lasted in the San Francisco career criminal division for 18 months before San Francisco’s city attorney called. She wanted Harris to come work on child welfare cases. Harris took the job with a condition: she would do court work and policy.“The work was meaningful, empowering and … [i]t also boosted my confidence that when I saw problems, I could be the one to help devise the solutions,” Harris wrote in her book. “All those times my mother had pressed me – ‘Well, what did you do?’ – suddenly made a lot more sense.”The experience was instructive. Harris, prompted by a friend she had met while serving on a non-profit board, ran for San Francisco district attorney. She defeated the incumbent, her old boss, and became the first person of color or woman to serve as district attorney. She was one of three elected Black district attorneys in the entire country.Just two years into her first term, Harris launched what was then a rare program, Back on Track, wherein first-time defendants aged 18-30 would plead guilty to non-violent crimes – and in exchange for getting a job or going to school, performing community service and making use of social workers, see their records expunged. Most years during the rest of Harris’s tenure, the program enrolled 100 or fewer participants, according to district attorney office data. But, only 10% of participants wound up back in the criminal justice system, compared to about half of otherwise comparable defendants in California. The program was evidence that Harris was trying to make good on the logic that had driven the decision to become a prosecutor, said Marshall, who served on the program’s advisory committee.The push and pull between being an insider who wants to change a troubled system, and working inside a system that has helped to sustain American racial inequality created tension for Harris after she ran for and won the California attorney general’s office in 2010, another role once held by Warren.In the attorney general’s office, Harris found herself defending the decisions of what she described as her clients – state agencies – in court. In 2011, that included the corrections department’s decision not to release all prisoners as per a US supreme court order, after evidence of malnutrition and dangerous levels of overcrowding were found in California’s prisons. Governing magazine found that California finally met the court’s mandates in 2015, while Harris was attorney general. What made the difference: voters approved measures reducing the punishment for a number of crimes, prompting prison populations to fall.View image in fullscreenCritics also often point to Harris’s belief that lives could be saved by disrupting the link between truancy and crime. In San Francisco, Harris’s team had discovered that many children missed school not because of their families’ views about education but because they had significant family problems such as no home, no clean clothes, or they needed to babysit an ill sibling so that parents would not miss work. So, they offered these families services that cut truancy by 23% in two years, according to San Francisco school district data reported by the attorney general’s office. But even in this system, some parents were hit with misdemeanor criminal charges, fines and other deterrent measures.Anthony Rackauckas Jr, a “law and order” tough-on-crime district attorney in southern California, used the state truancy law that Harris had championed to have a number of parents, many of them Black, Latino or caring for disabled children, arrested. Harris bore much of the public blame. The law remains in place, as do real differences in the way some district attorneys apply it.In a 2019 interview with HuffPost, Jeff Adachi, a former chief public defender of San Francisco, said: “I think it was a good thing that [Harris] shined a light on [truancy]. There is a correlation between children who fail at school and what happens later in life. [But] the idea of locking parents up, or citing them with a crime because they’re not taking their children to school – it doesn’t address the root of the problem.”Meeting Doug EmhoffIn 2014, at 49, Harris got married for the first time. Harris met Douglas Emhoff, a California lawyer, on a blind date set up by Harris’s best friend. The connection came with habit-aware instructions: you are going on a date. Do not Google him in advance. You will give him a chance. Harris has said she abided by two of the three.Harris discovered that she liked Emhoff almost immediately, she wrote in her book. Emhoff has said that he too was instantly smitten. So, when Harris warned him on that first date that she was a very busy woman, Emhoff went home and emailed a list of dates when he was available for the next few months. People around her noticed the difference Emhoff made.“They would later refer to that era as ‘AD – After Doug’,” Harris wrote. “They loved how much he made me laugh. I did too.”At their August wedding, officiated by Harris’s sister, Harris put a flower garland around Emhoff’s neck, a traditional Indian wedding practice, and he stomped on a covered glass, a Jewish wedding tradition. Harris really liked Emhoff’s kids: his son, Cole, and daughter, Ella, named after John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald. Harris instituted a tradition of sit-down Sunday dinners with her new family. Cooking together and talking in the kitchen, Harris has said, features prominently in her memories of her own mother, who died of cancer in 2009.Harris and Emhoff were still newlyweds when the US senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from California, announced that she would not seek a sixth term in January 2015. One week later, Harris was in the Senate race. Joe Biden, then the vice-president, swore her into office.Family and lots of friends, including Brown and several more of Harris’s AKA sisters, watched Harris become the first Black senator from California and the only Black woman in the US Senate. In fact, Harris was only the second Black woman to become a senator in the US and the first woman of south Asian descent to do so.White House ambitionsWhen Harris decided to launch a 2020 bid for the White House, she’d been in the Senate about three years. Harris had sponsored 164 bills and/or co-sponsored another 1,197. (Twenty-five have since become law, according to federal records.) As a member of the Senate judiciary committee, she had grilled some witnesses – Brett Kavanaugh, the future supreme court justice among them – in ways that had, for a time, captured the country’s attention.But, her 2020 presidential campaign never seemed to gain momentum under the weight of the widespread condemnation of the American criminal justice system that peaked after the murder of George Floyd.The most significant moment of the short-lived campaign probably came on a primary debate stage. Harris asked Biden to acknowledge that during his long tenure in the Senate, his work with avowed segregationists to stymie federal funding that would have facilitated more busing to integrate schools had been wrong. One of those children to whom bussing had brought opportunities, Harris said on stage, “was me”.View image in fullscreenBut just as the broader culture was undergoing an alleged racial reckoning, similar discussions were happening inside politics. Biden wasn’t the only white power player already well over 70 and going nowhere. Black women, long the backbone of the Democratic party’s voter and organizing base remained scarce in senior positions. Outside consultants and party officials often spent money and political capital in the pursuit of white swing voters, a relatively small group. So, when decisions were being made, when policy priorities were being set, few Black women, and few people born after the July 1964 Civil Rights Act, for that matter, were in those rooms. There was a sense that a debt was owed, the bill was due.Political leaders like Karen Finney, a political strategist and former spokesperson for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, and communications director at the Democratic National Committee; Glynda Carr, president and CEO of Higher Heights for America, which works to grow Black women’s political power; Donna Brazile, a political strategist, two-time chair of the Democratic party and the first Black woman to run a presidential campaign; and Minyon Moore, a former Clinton administration official and political consultant, now serving as chair of the 2024 party convention, began to talk about the fact that there were Black women qualified for the vice-president’s job and they should be considered, Finney said.Their recommendation – made in a Zoom meeting with Biden and his team – was Harris.When the story is told by Harris’s opponents, she is the typecasted VP, someone selected in a process that didn’t start with résumés or even political calculus. In reality, just about every vice-president was picked much the same way. Only, time and time again, no Black women had been considered.“It’s a political strategy on the part of the Republican party to undermine [Harris] and to undermine her qualifications,” Finney said. “And unfortunately … this is a very typical playbook that’s often used.”Women’s issues? ‘Oh, you mean the economy’In the White House, Biden gave Harris early tasks which, at minimum, must be described as hard. Chief among them: identifying and helping the administration to address the root causes of the increase in undocumented immigration. Getting to the root causes and their solutions by traveling to Guatemala and Mexico was never going to generate photos of Harris hanging out of the top of a tank or standing at the border with a bullhorn. That really wasn’t Harris’s style or the nature of her assignment, either.Harris didn’t stave off the critics. During a sit-down interview, Harris laughed when Lester Holt, the NBC Nightly News anchor, asked when she would visit the US-Mexico border. The causes of illegal immigration don’t begin within a few feet of the Rio Grande and she hadn’t personally visited Europe either, she responded, saying no one was accusing her of ignoring or avoiding issues there. Republican officials pounced. There was, in Trump’s view, an “invasion” at the border. And many Democrats weren’t happy with a directive Harris issued to undocumented immigrants in a subsequent press conference: “Don’t come” – seeking asylum at a US border crossing is a legal act.“We had never had a Black female vice-president,” said Finney. “She was basically doing the job in her own way but it’s a role that was created for white men. So of course she’s not going to be doing it in the same way all the men before her did it.”The rest of Harris’s portfolio has been largely complicated or long-running matters of domestic concern including gun violence, barriers to entrepreneurship and full economic inclusion for all Americans, maternal healthcare and “gender policy”. Harris has said that when people ask her to talk about “women’s issues”, she often replies: “Oh, you mean the economy.”View image in fullscreenAs vice-president in Washington, Harris cast 33 tie-breaking votes in the US Senate, many to complete or move forward Biden’s nominees for various senior-level federal jobs. She also broke ties more than any other vice-president in history. And she has become the administration’s foremost voice on abortion access.She spoke about it in ways that many who weren’t in the meetings on other issues or working in the vice-president’s office began to notice in March when Harris became the first vice-president to visit a healthcare facility offering abortions in St Paul, Minnesota. There, Harris discussed women’s healthcare and the situation emerging in states that have banned abortions, and warned reporters and others there to brace themselves because she was going to use anatomically correct terms and use the “bouquet of microphones” to share women’s experiences. Tim Walz, the governor, was standing right behind her.“When she was given the roles … then she was able to speak, and she did so very confidently, very boldly,” said Christian Nunes, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW).The birth of the Harris campaignOn 21 July, Harris’s campaign filed paperwork only hours after Biden’s announcement, making her an official candidate for the White House. By that evening, it was clear: this was different.More than 40,000 Black women gathered for a Zoom meeting that night to recognize the significance of the moment, raise money and start organizing. The volume of interest required an exception to Zoom’s virtual meeting size limits, and $1.6m was raised in a few hours. The concept of extremely frank, in-group conversations – about this moment and the specific responses different groups of voters could have, and the stakes they should contemplate – gained traction. White Dudes for Harris, Black Men for Harris, Evangelicals for Harris and Republicans for Harris have gathered in the weeks since.One participant in the estimated 160,000-person white women’s Zoom said every woman and girl in the country faced real threats under a possible second Trump administration, including a loss of control over their bodies and, with that, their lives. “Your whiteness,” one woman in the same Zoom meeting said, “will not save you.” At the same time, over on social media, Kamala was chartreuse green; Kamala was brat. Supercuts of Kamala captured her dancing with marching bands and confidently delivering lacerating, pro-Harris assessments of Trump, some of them backed by the sound of Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us and Chappell Roan’s Femininomenon.“You can’t buy that,” said Cornell Belcher, a pollster and founder of the political strategy firm Brilliant Corners who knows Harris and may be best known for his work on the Obama campaigns. “That’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars and it has to happen organically.”Four days after Harris declared herself a candidate for the presidency, she was in Indianapolis, inside the Indiana convention center to address more than 6,000 members of the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Inc, another member of the Divine Nine.“In this moment,” Harris told the people seated at a sea of round tables before her, “I believe that we face a choice between two different visions for our nation, one focused on the future and the other focused on the past. And with your support, I am fighting for our nation’s future.”“Recognize there are those who are trying to take us back,” Harris continued. “But we are not going back.”It was the birth of the Harris campaign. More

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      ‘We know who built this country’: Walz courts union workers in first solo event

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      Tim Walz held his first solo campaign event since being selected as Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential nominee on Tuesday, rallying union members in Los Angeles and denouncing Donald Trump’s record on labor rights.The Minnesota governor’s appearance, at an event hosted by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, was the first in a five-state fundraising campaign as Walz ramps up support for the still-young Democratic ticket.Speaking to thousands of union members in a darkened auditorium, Walz said he and Harris will support workers by bringing collective bargaining and other protections to “every state in the union”. The 1.4-million-member union has endorsed Harris.“We know exactly who built this country,” Walz said. “People in this room built the middle class.”He emphasized his and Harris’s history of supporting worker protections, including appearances that both candidates have made on picket lines and the ban Minnesota passed on captive audience meetings during his tenure as governor. Walz said that he was the “first union member on a presidential ticket since Ronald Regan”, but promised: “I won’t lose my way.” (Trump was a member of the Screen Actors Guild before resigning in 2021.)Walz then pivoted to warn them of what the future might look like for workers if the former president and his running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, are elected, saying: “They see the world very differently then we do.”“The only thing those two guys know about working people is how to work to take advantage of them,” Walz said. “Every single chance they’ve gotten they’ve waged war on workers.”He described a future where bargaining rights, overtime pay and other protections would be cut, referencing steps that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 outlines for restricting worker rights under a second Trump presidency.The Trump campaign has also courted union support. When Trump accepted the Republican nomination last month, he said he would rescue the auto industry from “complete obliteration”.However, this morning the United Auto Workers union also filed federal unfair labor practice charges against Trump and Elon Musk over comments the two made during a live stream on X, which included threats to fire workers for going on strike.“You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump told Musk. “I mean, I look at what you do,” Trump said. “You walk in, you say, you want to quit? They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, that’s OK, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.”Walz concluded by referencing his own record of service, and attacks Republicans have made on his military service. “I’m proud to have served my country and I always will be,” he said.On Tuesday Walz also addressed a fundraiser in Newport Beach, and plans to speak in Denver and Boston tomorrow, before heading to Newport, Rhode Island, and Southampton, New York, on Thursday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt a fundraiser at the Balboa Bay Resort in Newport Beach on Tuesday, the Orange County Register reported, Walz peppered his 30-minute appearance “with Midwest jokes and self-deprecating quips”.“I couldn’t be more surprised if I woke up with my head stapled to the carpet,” he told an attendee who asked whether he was surprised to be selected as the vice-presidential nominee, before refocusing on his running mate.“You know better than anybody in this state what we’ve got in the vice-president. She’s found her voice,” Walz saidWalz also noted that his daughter, Hope, was in attendance at the Orange county event, before sharing his family’s story of conceiving Hope through IVF treatments.Also in attendance were multiple California Democratic house members, including representatives Nanette Barragán of South Gate, Mike Levin of San Juan Capistrano and Katie Porter of Irvine. Levin, who had been one of the first to call on President Joe Biden to abandon his re-election campaign, told the Register: “I want to win the election in November and defeat Donald Trump. Vice-President Harris and Governor Walz give us a great chance to do just that.”Donors in Newport Beach, one of California’s wealthier and more conservative regions, have contributed $770,000 to Trump’s campaign this election cycle; compared with $145,000 for the Democratic campaigns, the Register reports, citing Federal Election Commission reports.Walz’s fundraising tour will continue in Denver and Boston tomorrow, before heading to Newport, Rhode Island, and Southampton, New York, on Thursday. More

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      ‘She makes us proud’: Harris raises over $12m in California as Pelosi welcomes her home

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      Kamala Harris returned home to the San Francisco Bay area for a Sunday fundraiser that drew top California Democrats and captured more than $12m for the conclusion of a swing state tour by the vice-president and her running mate, Tim Walz.Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and California governor Gavin Newsom attended the event in San Francisco at the Fairmont Hotel, where nearly 700 people had purchased tickets that cost at least $3,300 and as much as $500,000.“This is a good day when we welcome Kamala Harris back home to California,” Pelosi said of the former US senator, attorney general and district attorney from the state.“She makes us all so proud. She brings us so much joy. She gives us so much hope,” Pelosi said at the fundraiser. She went on to describe Harris as a person of “great strength” and someone who is “politically very astute”.Harris and Walz, the Minnesota governor, have just finished a tour of multiple political swing states, packing rallies with thousands of people and building on the momentum that has propelled her since she took over at the top of the Democratic ticket.Pelosi, the longtime lawmaker and Washington power broker, is credited with helping usher Joe Biden out of the presidential race.The president, 81, stepped aside last month after a poor debate performance against Donald Trump sparked turmoil within the Democratic party and concerns that he could not beat the former president nor complete a second four-year term.Pelosi’s comments in a television interview suggesting that Biden had not yet decided whether to step aside were viewed as giving an opening to worried Democratic lawmakers to urge him to leave even as Biden said he was staying.Pelosi has praised Biden’s achievements while criticizing his former campaign. On Sunday she connected Harris, 59, to the accomplishments of Biden’s administration.“She knows the issues. She knows the strategy. She has gotten an enormous amount done working with Joe Biden,” Pelosi said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris acknowledged the enthusiasm but cautioned against getting caught up in it.“We can take nothing for granted in this critical moment,” she said, after thanking Pelosi for her friendship and support. “There is so much about the future of our country that has relied on leaders like Nancy Pelosi that have the grit, the determination, the brilliance to know what’s possible and to make it so,” Harris said.“The energy is undeniable,” Harris said of her campaign. “Yes, the crowds are large.”Her campaign hauled in $36m in the 24 hours following Walz’s selection as running mate and raised $310m in July, according to a campaign spokesperson.Harris, making her own case against Trump, said that if Trump got back into office, he would sign a national ban on abortion into law and warned that California would not be immune. Trump has sought to distance himself from Republican efforts to ban abortion, saying it should be up to individual states.Harris noted that some states’ laws don’t include exceptions for rape and incest, and said it’s “immoral”. “When this issue has been on the ballot, the American people have voted for freedom,” Harris said. More

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      ‘I guess we all look alike’: Trump accused of mixing up Black politicians in helicopter story

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      Nate Holden, the former Los Angeles city council member and California state senator, said that he was on the helicopter ride with Donald Trump that was forced to make an emergency landing.In an interview with Politico on Friday, Holden, who is now 95, referred to the former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, who Trump insisted was on the helicopter ride, saying: “Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco … I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles.”He added: “I guess we all look alike.”Holden’s interview followed Trump’s press conference on Thursday, in which the former president claimed to “know Willie Brown very well” and recalled an alleged story in which he “went down in a helicopter with him”.Trump said: “We thought, maybe this is the end. We were in a helicopter going to a certain location together, and there was an emergency landing. This was not a pleasant landing, and Willie was … a little concerned. So I know him pretty well.”Shortly after the press conference, Brown spoke to San Francisco-based radio station KRON4 and denied the story, saying: “I’ve never done business with Donald Trump, let’s start with that. And secondly, I don’t think I’d want to ride on the same helicopter with him. There’s too many people that have an agenda with reference to him, including the people who service helicopters!”Reports ultimately emerged that the helicopter ride in question was a 2018 one during which Trump and then California governor Jerry Brown inspected wildfire damage.Then governor-elect Gavin Newsom was also on that ride. Speaking to the New York Times, Newsom said: “I call complete BS. I was on a helicopter with Jerry Brown and Trump, and it didn’t go down.”Holden, in the Politico interview, recalled a helicopter ride with Trump that he believes happened in 1990; he told the outlet that he had been in touch with Trump because Trump was trying to build on the site of the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles – an area Holden represented at the time.Holden added that he met Trump at Trump Tower and they were then on their way to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where they were going to tour Trump’s Taj Mahal casino.Trump’s late brother Robert, the attorney Harvey Freedman and Barbara Res, Trump’s former executive vice-president of construction and development, were alongside Holden and Trump, Politico said.Res confirmed to the outlet that the man in question was definitely Holden.In her book All Alone on the 68th Floor, which Politico reviewed, Res recalled the helicopter ride, writing: “From the corner of my eye, I can see in the cockpit, and what I see is the co-pilot pumping a device with all his might.”“Very shortly thereafter the pilot let us know he had lost some instruments and we would need to make an emergency landing,” she continued, writing, “By now, the helicopter was shaking like crazy.”Donald and Robert Trump were both reassuring Holden, who told Politico that it was Donald Trump who “was white as snow … [and] scared shitless”.The Guardian has contacted Holden for comment. More

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      Chopper whopper: Willie Brown shoots down Trump’s helicopter story

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      In his press conference at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, Donald Trump’s stream of invective, wild claims and outright lies included a story about a brush with death during a helicopter ride with Willie Brown, a veteran California politician who once briefly dated Kamala Harris, now Trump’s Democratic rival in the presidential election.Claiming to “know Willie Brown very well”, Trump said: “In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him. We thought, maybe this is the end. We were in a helicopter going to a certain location together, and there was an emergency landing. This was not a pleasant landing, and Willie was … a little concerned. So I know him pretty well.”Trump also said Brown told him “terrible things” about Harris and was “not a fan of hers very much at that point”.Both parts of Trump’s story turned out to be untrue.It quickly became clear after the news conference on Thursday that Trump was talking about a helicopter ride with Jerry Brown, then the California governor. Furthermore, Willie Brown had nothing bad to say about Harris.The pair dated nearly 30 years ago. Brown, 90, told the New York Times, adding: “No hard feelings.”Of Trump’s helicopter claim, he said: “You know me well enough to know that if I almost went down in a helicopter with anybody, you would have heard about it!”Speaking to KRON4, a San Francisco-area radio station, Brown said: “I’ve never done business with Donald Trump, let’s start with that. And secondly, I don’t think I’d want to ride on the same helicopter with him. There’s too many people that have an agenda with reference to him, including the people who service helicopters!”It was widely established that Trump’s helicopter ride happened in 2018, when Trump was president and he and Jerry Brown took a trip to inspect wildfire damage.Through a spokesperson, Jerry Brown said: “There was no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris.”It turned out that Gavin Newsom, the current governor of California, was on the flight too, as governor-elect.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I call complete BS,” Newsom told the Times, while “laughing out loud”.Trump did repeatedly bring up the subject of crashing, Newsom said, but: “We talked about everyone else, but not Kamala.”Trump held his press conference in an attempt to highlight Harris’s lack of such events since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee, after Joe Biden dropped his re-election campaign less than three weeks ago and endorsed his vice-president to replace him at the top of the 2024 presidential ticket. But the former president’s chaotic and bad-tempered event did little to reset a campaign narrative showing Harris surging in popularity on the campaign trail as the former president flounders.Newsom told the Times he thought the press conference was “an act of desperation”. More

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      Kamala Harris’s home town cheers historic White House run: ‘She’s going to do it’

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      As Kamala Harris emerged as the Democratic frontrunner to replace Joe Biden, residents of her home town of Berkeley, California, greeted the news of her potentially history-making White House run with enthusiasm – and some trepidation.Those who once knew her as a little girl living above a daycare on Bancroft Avenue were proud of their home town hero and – like many Democratic supporters in the US – hopeful she has a better chance than Joe Biden of beating Donald Trump.“This was where her story began,” said Carole Porter, 60, standing on a corner where she and Harris waited for the school bus starting as first-graders, both participating in a city campaign to desegregate local schools. “For people of color and for women, once she breaks that glass ceiling – and I’m sure she’s going to do it – there’s no going back.”Days after Biden’s historic decision to exit the US presidential race, Democrats have largely coalesced around the vice-president – raising a record $81m in 24 hours for her campaign and gaining the support of top party members including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Nancy Pelosi and Biden himself.Born in Oakland, Harris moved to the neighboring city of Berkeley where she lived until she was 12 with her single mother, Shyamala, and sister, Maya. She later served as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general, before becoming the state’s junior senator.The East Bay neighborhood where Harris and Porter rode bikes as children is steeped in political and cultural history. Across the street is the former home of the first Black mayor of Berkeley, and several blocks away sits a school where the radical Black Panthers organization first organized free breakfasts for children. Its founder, Huey P Newton, frequented the area.Harris joined that legacy in 2020, when she became the first woman in US history and the first Black woman and woman of south Asian descent to be elected as vice-president. Now she stands poised to make history once again as the first woman of color to lead a presidential ticket and – if she wins – the first female president of the United States.Porter said coming from this area, historically a red-lined district primarily inhabited by Black and immigrant families, gives her “a broad perspective”.View image in fullscreen“I think because we were in such an accepting environment of all people, that is where her baseline is,” Porter said. “She has no obstacles, no judgment and no thinking that she has to do or be anything different than who she is.”Biden’s decision to step aside came as a relief to many, following weeks of concern among Democratic party members and voters that the president was not fit to run for re-election. Still, some voters in Harris’ former stomping grounds are wary of her chances in November.Tina, a 60-year-old voter who requested not to be quoted by last name, said she was “thrilled” to hear Harris is being considered as the top candidate, but questioned whether she will be able to win. “She’s got a lot stacked against her,” she said. “I mean, we weren’t even able to vote a white woman into the White House before.”Other voters echoed those concerns. “I worry about the misogyny vote,” said Pat Roberto, a woman strolling down Solano Avenue, a street adjacent to Thousand Oaks elementary school, which Harris attended as a child. “She wouldn’t have been my ideal, but she is better than Trump, and that’s what we need – to get him out.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlthough Trump is expected to attack Harris as being further left than Biden on many issues, voters in her blue home state have often criticized the former prosecutor for being too centrist or even conservative on some issues.View image in fullscreen“I have never been a big supporter of her, because she is a prosecutor and I am kind of on the other end of the spectrum,” said Paula Dodd, a 69-year-old voter who has lived in the Bay Area her whole life and was enjoying lunch near Harris’s former elementary school. “She’s definitely not a traditional Californian in that regard – she’s not super progressive.”Brian Dodd, lunching at the same table, said that could be seen as a strength for Harris. “That’s what gives me hope, that she can appeal to more people,” he said.Polling has shown Harris’s favorability ratings are similar to those of Trump and Biden. A June AP-Norc poll found about four in 10 Americans have a favorable opinion of her, though the share of those who have unfavorable opinion was slightly lower than for Trump and Biden.Despite misgivings, there was an air of excitement in the neighborhood on Monday. “We figure they’ll be renaming the school after she gets elected,” Brian Dodd said. More

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      Adam Schiff says Biden should ‘pass the torch’ and bow out of 2024 US election

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      Adam Schiff, the high-profile California Democrat and US Senate candidate, on Wednesday called on Joe Biden to end his presidential campaign, stating he had “serious concerns” about the president’s ability to beat Donald Trump in November.In a statement to the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles-area congressman joined almost 20 other congressional Democrats in asking the president to step aside. Biden “has been one of the most consequential presidents in our nation’s history”, Schiff said, but it was time “to pass the torch”.“A second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundation of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about whether the president can defeat Donald Trump in November,” Schiff told the newspaper.The development comes as an increasing number of Democrats express doubts about whether Biden can win in November and concerns over his age and cognitive abilities following his debate performance against Trump.A new survey published this week found that nearly two-thirds of Democrats want Biden to withdraw. Only about three in 10 Democrats are extremely or very confident that Biden has the mental capability to serve effectively, the AP-Norc Center for Public Affairs Research survey also found.Some of Biden’s top donors have said that he should bow out, and have paused donations until he does so. It was reported on Tuesday that Schiff had told donors he believed Democrats would lose the presidency, and probably the House and Senate as well, if Biden remained on the ticket. “I think if he is our nominee, I think we lose,” the New York Times reported Schiff told donors in New York.With Democrats in turmoil, the party backtracked on Wednesday on plans to expedite a virtual roll call to officially select Biden as its presidential nominee before August after facing opposition from several House members. The members had planned to send a letter to the DNC calling a proposal to fast-track Biden’s nomination a “terrible idea”.“We’re glad to see that the pressure has worked and the DNC will not rush this virtual process through in July,” said a spokesperson for the congressman Jared Huffman, a California Democrat.The Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, who heads the DNC’s rules committee, confirmed during a press conference in Milwaukee on Wednesday morning that the roll call vote will not be conducted this month. The governor’s spokesperson later confirmed that the process should wrap up by 7 August.The extended deadline buys Democrats more time for continued internal debate over whether Biden should remain the party’s nominee.For his part, Schiff said on Wednesday he would support whoever is the Democratic nominee, including Biden, and will do anything to help the ticket succeed.“There is only one singular goal: defeating Donald Trump. The stakes are just too high,” he told the LA Times. More