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      UFOs back in spotlight as ‘surreal’ Washington hearing buoys believers

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      As the world heard tales of recovered alien bodies, crashed extraterrestrial spaceships, and an apparently violent plot to conceal both, not everyone was immediately willing to believe.The Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, inadvertently swept up in this week’s remarkable UFO congressional hearing in Washington through her role on the House of Representatives oversight committee, seemed determined to not get too carried away by a surge of interest in UFOs that is transfixing much of the US.Speaking afterwards, the leftwing New York congresswoman instead sought to characterize her colleagues’ quest to uncover the government’s alleged alien cover-up as an investigation into national security and military furtiveness – not hiding little green men.“This committee has encountered instances before where either defense activity has not been forthright, whether that be from a contracting space or from the DoD space,” Ocasio-Cortez told the Guardian.“I do believe that there is a very large and looming question about what is being disclosed, what is being properly stewarded, and we have a responsibility across all subject matters to pursue that truth.”It was a commendably bland take on a two-hour-plus hearing which was unlike anything Congress had ever seen before.David Grusch, the former US intelligence officer who claims that the US government is harboring “intact and partially intact” and “non-human” pilots, appeared in Washington, under oath, to repeat the same.The US government conducted a “multi-decade” program which collected, and attempted to reverse-engineer, crashed UFOs, Grusch told the oversight committee. He added that unnamed federal agencies had even recovered “biologics” from these craft, which he described as “non-human”.Moreover, Grusch, who led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP) within a US Department of Defense agency until 2023, said he had encountered “people who have been harmed or injured” in the course of the government’s efforts to keep this alien program secret. Grusch told the committee that after going public with his allegations he had feared for his life.Happily for Grusch, and for the scores of UFO enthusiasts who flooded to the hearing, some of the politicians listening appeared to be completely sold.“I believe they [aliens] exist. I knew that before I came in here,” Tim Burchett, a Republican congressman from Tennessee, told the Guardian.“I don’t want to oversimplify it, but how are you going to fly one [a spaceship]? You got to have somebody in it. That seems to be pretty simple,” Burchett said.If Burchett’s statement seemed to ignore longstanding earth-bound technology which already commonly enables unmanned flight via drones, his enthusiasm will at least have buoyed onlookers. Given the Republican is co-leading the investigation into Grusch’s claims, he seems a good person to have convinced.Also onboard is Matt Gaetz, a rightwing Republican from Florida.Gaetz, Burchett and Anna Paulina Luna, also from Florida, had caused a kerfuffle at a Florida air force base a week earlier when they turned up demanding to see evidence of a recently reported UFO incident.Gaetz said that having initially being denied access to the base, the trio were eventually shown an “image” of unidentified anomalous phenomena – a term preferred by some to UFO.“The image was of something that I am not able to attach to any human capability either from the United States, or from any of our adversaries,” Gaetz said.Luna, who is co-leading the oversight committee investigation with Burchett, also seemed keen.“It is unacceptable to continue to gaslight Americans into thinking this is not happening,” she said during Wednesday’s hearing. A day later Luna told Axios that her interest in UFOs came from encountering one in 2018.Claims of UFOs, and of the government covering up aliens, have a long history in the US.In the 1940s and 50s, reports of UFOs, usually in the shape of a “flying saucer”, were commonplace, while Grusch himself has suggested – although not in Wednesday’s hearing – that Pope Pius XII negotiated the transfer of a UFO from Mussolini’s Italy to the US in 1944.It wasn’t until the past couple of years, however, that Congress really began to take notice.Grusch’s accusations might have ultimately prompted this investigation, but the discussion of UFOs has been lent something approaching legitimacy by leaked military videos which appear to show odd-shaped objects zipping about in American aerospace, and claims from US navy pilots of strange encounters.Two of those pilots – David Fravor and Ryan Graves – gave testimony on Wednesday. Graves, who has previously reported seeing unidentified aerial phenomena off the Atlantic coast “every day for at least a couple years”, said that other, unnamed pilots had come across “dark grey or black cubes inside of clear spheres” where “the apex or tips of the cube were touching the inside of the sphere”.Not everyone, however, was impressed with the new disclosures. Grusch has not personally seen any of the things he described, and his claims are based on interviews with people “with direct knowledge” of governmental goings on, which has raised eyebrows among skeptics.“Fravor and Graves for years have been telling this story pretty much as best as they can. And Grusch: I suspect he believes his story,” said Mick West, author of Escaping the Rabbit Hole. How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect.“So it didn’t really change that aspect of it for me. I already believe that they thought they were telling the truth, what I don’t think is that what they’re describing is an accurate representation of the facts.”West, a longtime investigator of alleged UFO encounters and claims, said sightings like the ones Fravor and Graves described could be attributed to radar issues or clutter, including balloons in the air.In terms of proving, unequivocally, that the US government has alien craft, and indeed aliens, West said it “will come down to the physical evidence”.“They say they know the exact locations of where these alien craft are. So if you want to tell the American public about the whole program, if Congress wants to do that, then they can just go and look at these craft,” he said.One issue which commonly raises doubts is that the US government has allegedly been able to keep its stash of UFOs secret – for decades.Given the leaks, scoops and whistleblowing on various governmental secrets and wrongdoing, this apparent ability to remain tight-lipped on what would be the biggest secret in human history would be remarkable.“And it’s not just the US government. It’s the whole world,” West said.Indeed, UFO sightings are not a uniquely American phenomenon. The UK, for one, has not been immune. In 2011 the British Ministry of Defence released 8,500 pages of reports on UFO sightings, dating back to the 1950s.The files included a report from one man who said he was “abducted” in October 1998, by aliens in a “large cigar-shaped vehicle with big projectiles on each side like wings”.“And what about all the other countries? There’s a lot of other landmass, lots of places for UFOs to crash. It doesn’t make any sense,” West said.Maybe it doesn’t, but there is evidence that international cooperation may be coming. In May the Pentagon held a UFO-focused briefing of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance – which includes the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia – with the promise of more meetings to come.And despite the lack of an extraterrestrial smoking gun, for longtime followers of UFO sightings, claims and developments Wednesday made for an extraordinary experience.“It was one of the most amazing and bizarre and surreal congressional hearings ever held,” said Nick Pope, who spent the early 1990s investigating UFOs for the British Ministry of Defence.“You had to almost pinch yourself and do a double-take when you heard phrases like ‘non-human intelligences’ and ‘biologics’ unpacked in the testimony.”Grusch didn’t produce new revelations, repeatedly stating that he could not elaborate further in a public setting, something which Pope said made sense.But some of the politicians spoke afterwards, however, about the importance of getting Grusch’s claims into the record. Pope said that was an important step in the road to finding out what the government might have.“It was clear listening to what the various people on the committee said that they weren’t going to let this lie,” Pope said. “You got a sense of the anger that they had, at the implication that things were being hidden from them improperly.”One thing is certain: the UFO craze is not going away.The next things to look out for include a Nasa report due to be published this month, while the Department of Defense is due to issue a report of its own this summer. There will probably be more congressional hearings when representatives, who are about to leave Washington on a month-long recess, return in September.“We’re not bringing little green men or flying saucers into the hearing. Sorry to disappoint about half y’all,” Burchett said at the start of proceedings on Wednesday.“We’re just going to get to the facts.”What those facts are, and when exactly they might be uncovered, remains to be seen. 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      Into the Bright Sunshine: how Hubert Humphrey joined the civil rights fight

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      Seventy-five years ago this month, at a fractious Philadelphia convention, Hubert Humphrey delivered a famous challenge: “The time has arrived in America for the Democratic party to get out of the shadows of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”In a new book, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, Samuel G Freedman helps explain the influences and experiences that led Humphrey, then a 37-year-old midwestern mayor, to take on segregationists in his own party.Humphrey won passage of a bold civil rights platform, triggering southern delegates to nominate Strom Thurmond as a “Dixiecrat” candidate for president. The same year, Humphrey won a race for Senate from Minnesota, launching a national career that culminated in his nomination for president, and defeat by Richard Nixon, in 1968.Freedman describes how Humphrey, who was born in South Dakota, saw Jim Crow up close as a graduate student at Louisiana State University.“Given the deliberate and scrupulous erasure of Black people from LSU, it required not flagrant bigotry but mere passivity for a white student to accept segregation as something like natural law,” Freedman writes. “Humphrey’s eyes were already too open for such obliviousness.”A sociology professor and German émigré, Rudolf Heberle, had a particularly important role in shaping Humphrey’s outlook. As Freedman recounts: “The Nazis’ regime of murderous extremism came to power, in Heberle’s analysis, not by a coup from the armed fringe but thanks to ‘mass support … from middle layers of society’. Reasonable people were entirely capable of acting in morally unreasonable ways and rationalizing away their actions. Heberle had seen and heard it during his fieldwork.”Heberle was suggesting that “the Jew in Germany was the Black in America”.After LSU, Humphrey returned to Minneapolis, where two locals – one Jewish, one Black – helped stiffen his resolve: Sam Scheiner, an attorney who led the Minnesota Jewish Council, and Cecil Newman, founder of the Minneapolis Spokesman newspaper.“There were people from throughout [Humphrey’s] life who recognized something in him – skills, yes, but something larger, a kind of destiny – more than he recognized it in himself,” Freedman writes. “He was their vessel and their voice, the vessel in which to pour their passion for a more just America and the voice to amplify that passion insistently enough to affect a nation whose soul was very much at stake.”Minneapolis’s track record on race has been in the news again. Last month, the US justice department said the 2020 police murder of George Floyd was part of a “pattern or practice” of excessive force and unlawful discrimination against African Americans.Nearly 80 years earlier, Humphrey tried to combat racism and antisemitism in the city.Minneapolis was infamous for antisemitism. In the 1930s, Freedman points out, a homegrown fascist group, the Silver Legion of America, called for “returning American Blacks to slavery and disenfranchising, segregating and finally sterilizing American Jews”. In 1946, the editor of the Nation, Carey McWilliams, called the city “the capital of antisemites”.After running for mayor in 1943, Humphrey mounted another run in 1945. In the year American soldiers defeated Hitler’s forces in Europe, gangs attacked and robbed Jews in Minneapolis, sometimes yelling “Heil, Hitler!” Local leaders were ineffective. But Humphrey, Freedman writes, “plainly shared the Jewish community’s belief that the problem went way deeper than mere hoodlums. For the first time in Minneapolis’s decades-long history of racism and antisemitism, a political candidate was placing those issues at the center of a campaign.”Humphrey offered a five-point plan, including the creation of an organization to combat bigotry. He won. Two months into his term, he was confronted with the wrongful arrest of two Black women. Newman, the Black newspaper publisher, called Humphrey at home. The mayor ordered the women released and the charges dropped.Later, Humphrey won passage of an anti-discrimination law and established a council on human relations, to investigate discrimination against racial and religious minorities. For his efforts, he faced an assassination attempt and threats from Nazis. But Humphrey turned the city around.“Minneapolis stood as virtually the only city in America where a wronged job applicant could count on the government as an ally,” Freedman writes.Humphrey used such work as a springboard, championing civil rights for the nation.“My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late,” he said at the 1948 convention, adding: “This is the issue of the 20th century.”In a 2010 documentary, Hubert H Humphrey: The Art of the Possible, former president Jimmy Carter, who was 23 when Humphrey spoke in Philadelphia, called the speech “earth-shattering, expressing condemnation of the racial segregation that had been in existence ever since the end of the civil war. And he was the only one that was courageous enough to do so”.When Humphrey got to Washington, he found himself ostracized by southern Democrats who dominated the Senate. As he recalled, “After all, I had been the destroyer of the Democratic party, the enemy of the south. Hubert Humphrey, the [N-word] lover.’ … I never felt so lonesome and so unwanted in all my life as I did in those first few weeks and months.”But he continued to champion equal rights, an effort that culminated, as majority whip, with breaking a southern filibuster to help win passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.Humphrey became vice-president, to Lyndon Johnson, then ran for president himself. But “for the rest of his life,” Freedman writes, he “kept the tally sheet on which he had marked the senators’ vote on cloture, the procedure that ended the filibuster and brought the bill to its successful enactment.”
      Into the Bright Sunshine is published in the US by Oxford University Press
      Frederic J Frommer is the author of books including You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals More

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      Tax complaint filed against rightwing parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty

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      A Michigan attorney has confirmed she filed an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) complaint against Moms for Liberty, the parental rights group with positions against racially inclusive and LGBTQ+ education in schools. The complaint, which is private but was obtained by the Guardian, alleges that the rightwing organization is in violation of its 501(c)4 non-profit status.Experts in tax law say an IRS investigation into the Moms for Liberty, named an extremist group by Southern Poverty Law Center, would take at least two years. If their non-profit status is revoked, it would most likely cause the group to re-characterize as a private organization, further decreasing transparency about how money is flowing into it.Representatives for Moms for Liberty declined to comment, saying they would be unable to respond to questions without seeing a copy of the complaint.The eight-page complaint questions whether Moms for Liberty is a political educational organization and notes public posts endorsing Republican candidates, the group’s campaigning for Republican candidates, and links to partisan training materials.“It would be a permissible educational purpose if there were advocating to remove gender discussions from classrooms and schools if there was a balanced presentation of benefits and drawbacks of using a person’s preferred pronouns, supporting LGBTQ youth, impacts on children of being ‘exposed’ to LGBTQ supportive environments,” the complaint states. “There is not.”The complaint cites a landmark case, American Campaign Academy v Commissioner, in which a school for Republican candidates was ultimately denied its non-profit status because it was providing partisan-only education.Admission to local chapters is through private Facebook pages and controlled by the national organization, the complaint continues, obscuring the ability to determine how the group’s educational activities benefit the public.The IRS complaint also examines if Moms for Liberty is an action organization, raising questions about its participation in political campaigns and active recruitment of school board candidates.“The promotion of social welfare does not include direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office,” the complaint reads. “However, a section 501(c)(4) social welfare organization may engage in some political activities, so long as that is not its primary activity.”Many of the elements of the complaint – the issues raised about Moms for Liberty’s private memberships and websites and questions about it being a political educational organization – will not pass muster, Phillip Hackney, associate professor of law at University of Pittsburgh said, though Hackney said he does think the complaint is correct in bringing up the group’s intervention in political campaigns. 501(c)4 groups, the most common type of dark money organizations, are allowed to endorse candidates and participate in an unlimited amount of lobbying. Hackney warned the group’s campaigning and promoting candidates can theoretically get into “a damage area” if it exceeds 25% of their group’s activities.If it stretches past that to 25 to 50% of the group’s activities, it reaches “a real danger zone”, he said. Once campaigning becomes more than half of what the group is participating in, they can lose their non-profit status. With continuing budget resolutions, Hackney said Congress has made it hard for the IRS to give clarity in this space.Additionally, Hackey calls 501(c)4 groups “charitable-organizations lite”, formed exclusively for social welfare purposes with the goal of doing something broadly in the public interest. Social welfare is a hard-to-define term, he said; as a result, the organizations that don’t quite fit the standards for a charitable non-profit will instead go into the “trash bin” of a 501(c)4.A wide range of organizations can fit into the gray-area definition of social welfare. An Urban Institute study found that the majority of 501(c)4 groups are community service clubs, but also include sports leagues, veterans organizations, health providers and insurers, and homeowner and tenant associations.More people are familiar with 501(c)3 non-profit, tax-exempt charitable organizations that do not need to pay taxes on earnings or donations, a benefit that makes this type of non-profit “superior” to 501(c)4 social welfare organizations, Hackney said. Charities can do a small amount of lobbying, though the exact amount of activities and expenses they’re allowed to contribute according to IRS law remains unclear. They are nonetheless prohibited from “intervening in a political campaign directly or indirectly”, such as endorsing a presidential candidate, Hackney said.“That same prohibition does not apply to a (c)4. A number of charitable organizations will set up a charity, then have a sister social welfare organization that conducts lobbying,” Hackney said, calling it a “troublesome space”.The charity will not be able to intervene with a political campaign, while the sister organization will. The organizations need to ensure the money coming in through the charity does not get mixed in with the 501(c)4 sister organization.Social welfare organizations do not receive the same type of far-reaching tax benefits as charities. For example, they do not need to pay taxes on their goods and services if they further the organization’s purpose. If that standard isn’t met, a business tax applies. Nevertheless, this type of non-profit structure contains a tremendous boon for wealthy donors: tax exemption on gifted securities.Barre Seid, a Chicago billionaire, donated $1.65bn in securities to the Marble Freedom Trust, a rightwing 501(c)4 run by Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo. Marble Freedom and Seid did not need to pay taxes on the stock transfer, which represented 100% of Seid’s ownership of the electrical goods manufacturing company Tripp Lite. If the securities had appreciated during the time frame Marble Freedom Trust owned the stock, it wouldn’t have been required to pay taxes on those gains. However, the conservative fund ultimately sold the stock; the power management company Eaton Corporation acquired it in March 2021.Within a month, Marble Freedom Trust used the proceeds from the sale to funnel tens of millions of dollars into other conservative groups advocating for rightwing judges and greater privacy protections for libertarian and conservative donors, CNN reported.Currently, charitable organizations and social welfare organizations do not need to disclose their donors. IRS rules about non-profit donor disclosures changed during the Trump administration, opening the tap for dark money to flood election politics without the public knowing about it. Hackney argued that disclosure is “a reasonable thing” that is “part of the democratic fabric”, but social welfare organizations are able to operate in a way that resists it, particularly when they are doing issue advocacy.IRS investigations into a 501(c)4 like Moms for Liberty would be “heavily fact intensive”, Hackney said, with an agent reviewing materials and going back and forth with attorneys for 18 months. The IRS has a statute of limitations to complete an investigation within three years, he said. If the group’s status is revoked after that time, it probably would not owe back taxes but would reorganize as a taxable, private organization with even less transparency and no prohibitions on political campaigning. More

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      Ron DeSantis sued over bid to restrict voting rights for people with past convictions

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      A voting rights group in Florida filed a lawsuit against the rightwing governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, saying his administration created a maze of bureaucratic and sometimes violent obstacles to discourage formerly incarcerated citizens from exercising their right to vote.Florida voters in 2018 overwhelmingly passed a constitutional referendum, called amendment 4, that lifted the state’s lifetime voting ban for people with felony convictions.Yet what ensued in the years since 2018 was an aggressive campaign, led by DeSantis, to sow confusion and fear among formerly incarcerated people. The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC), which championed amendment 4, said state officials have continued to disenfranchise 1.4 million Florida residents – roughly a quarter of the state’s eligible Black voters.“Who is the public supposed to rely on to determine voter eligibility?” said the FRRC’s executive director, Desmond Meade. “We’re saying that it is the responsibility of the state. The law says it is the responsibility of the state.”DeSantis appears to disagree. The lawsuit, resubmitted on Friday by the FRRC, comes a year after the Florida governor ordered the arrests of dozens of people who participated in the 2020 election, including people who had been issued voter registration cards from the Florida department of state.“If the state dropped the ball by incorrectly verifying these people’s eligibility to vote, before you take someone’s liberty, they should fix their broken system,” Meade said.In 2019, Florida lawmakers passed a controversial bill requiring people with felony convictions to repay all outstanding debts before having their voting rights restored under amendment 4. But the state has no centralized database that records how much each individual person owes in court fines. Each county clerk’s office has a different method of calculating the amount of money that a formerly incarcerated person owes the state, complicating the process of paying off fines.“So you’re telling people that you have to pay your debt before you’re able to vote,” said Meade. “But there’s no guarantee that the state could even tell them exactly what they owe?”The lawsuit said this system, in which local and state election officials cannot be trusted to dole out accurate information about voter eligibility, is part of an intentional, state-sponsored campaign to dismantle amendment 4.“This is not simply the result of administrative failures or bureaucratic ineptitude,” the complaint reads.According to documents shared with the Guardian, the FRRC repeatedly contacted the state election officials between 2018 and today, offering potential solutions to streamline the process of registering voters.When the Florida department of state declined to hire additional staff to tackle a mounting backlog of voter registration applications from formerly incarcerated people, the FRRC offered to shoulder the costs. The advocacy group could identify and reach out to people whose court fines had been paid, easing the state officials’ workload.The state’s response has been lukewarm. Efforts to establish a public-private partnership have been slow to advance over five years.“We’ve had three different secretaries of state since the passage of amendment 4, each with different staff,“ said the FRRC deputy director, Neil Volz. “We still have not seen this become a priority.”Natalie Meiner, a spokeswoman for the Florida department of state, said: “The department does not comment on pending litigation.”The FRRC said it was still in talks with the state department.“We just want the state to do its job,” said Volz.The lawsuit is a last-ditch attempt to make accurate voter registration a priority for elected officials. But they worry that, without court intervention, state officials will keep amendment 4 in holding pattern, rejecting offers of assistance.Volz wants people who had their voting rights restored under amendment 4 vote in the 2024 presidential election without fear of prosecution. But the memory of last year’s arrests, announced by DeSantis just days before the 2022 primary elections in Florida, is still fresh in the minds of millions of Florida residents.Romona Oliver was driving home from work last August when she saw a group of Florida law enforcement officers in her driveway.“She was upset, and asked what she was being arrested for, and they’re telling her voting fraud,” said her attorney, Mark Rankin.Shortly after taking her case, Rankin learned that Oliver had submitted a voter registration application before the 2020 election. The state approved her application and sent her a voter registration card.“She even went to the DMV at a later date to change her driver’s license because she got married, and the state issued her a second voter registration card in her new name,” said Rankin “So now she’s been basically told twice that she’s eligible to vote.”The government had made a mistake. Oliver was ineligible to vote because she was convicted of second-degree murder in 2000 – amendment 4 does not restore the rights of people convicted of murder or felony sex offense.Prosecutors offered Oliver a plea deal of “no contest” to the charge of voter fraud.The other felony charge against Oliver was dismissed. She agreed to spend time in county jail on the day of her arrest. The court fines were waived.“So basically, you just let her walk away to make it go away,” Rankin said. “But because she pleaded no contest, they were able to have what they wanted, which was a newspaper headline that says, ‘local defendant accepts plea deal,’ which I think is the point of all this.”FRRC leaders said the highly publicized arrests were the final step in a complex scheme of voter intimidation designed by the DeSantis administration.Millions of Florida residents, including the plaintiffs in the new lawsuit, watched as people like Oliver were taken away in handcuffs just days before the 2022 midterm elections in Florida. The videos of arrests were a grim warning of what might happen to individuals who misunderstand the parameters of amendment 4.“Those videos showed me that even if you honestly believe you are able to vote, they can arrest you anyway,” said Rhoshanda Bryant-Jones, one of the four individual plaintiffs in the case.Bryant-Jones was convicted over a decade ago for narcotics-related crimes. Since her release from prison, she recovered from substance abuse issues and created a small business that helps other people battle addiction.“I am not willing to risk my freedom, and all that I have accomplished,” she said. “Even though the day I thought I had my rights restored by amendment 4 was one of the great blessings of my life.”By raising the specter of arrest, DeSantis sent a message to Bryant-Jones and all other Florida residents who might have had their rights restored under amendment 4: don’t bother trying to understand if you’re eligible to vote, the risks are not worth it.Most of the August 2022 arrests follow a similar pattern: voters had assumed that they were eligible to vote because election officials had told them so.If Oliver had rejected the plea deal, prosecutors would need to prove that she somehow knew the government had erred by approving her voter registration application.“But it doesn’t really matter if you ultimately prove that you didn’t violate the law because you had no idea you were ineligible to vote,” said Blair Bowie, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center who specializes in restoring voting rights for people with felony convictions.Most of the people who DeSantis targeted, like Oliver, do not have the financial resources to fight a prolonged legal battle, so they opted for a plea deal.“And you have to remember that these are people who have already been through the wringer of the criminal legal system and really, really don’t want to go back to prison,” Bowie said.“This organized push to arrest people who seem to clearly have made good faith mistakes,” Bowie added. “It is something I don’t think we’ve seen at this scale since the end of the civil rights era.” More

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      Trump faces more charges in classified documents case as second aide named

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      Federal prosecutors on Thursday expanded the indictment against Donald Trump for retaining national security documents and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them, unveiling new charges against him and an employee over an attempt to destroy surveillance footage.The new charges – filed by the special counsel Jack Smith in Florida – were outlined in a superseding indictment that named Mar-a-Lago club maintenance worker Carlos De Oliveira as the third co-defendant in the case. Trump’s valet Walt Nauta was previously indicted for obstruction with the former president last month.Trump’s legal exposure in the classified documents case grew after he was accused of attempting to destroy evidence and inducing someone else to destroy evidence, as well as an additional count under the Espionage Act for retaining a classified document about US plans to attack Iran that he discussed on tape at his Bedminster club in New Jersey.The expanded indictment added a new section titled “The Attempt to Delete Security Camera Footage” that alleged in detail how Trump engaged in a scheme with Nauta and De Oliveira to wipe a server containing surveillance footage that prosecutors subpoenaed which showed boxes of classified documents being removed from the storage room.According to the indictment, Trump seemingly instructed Nauta to unexpectedly travel to Mar-a-Lago to have the tapes destroyed. Nauta then enlisted the help of De Oliveira, and they walked to a security booth where the camera angles were displayed on monitors before walking down to the cameras and pointing them out with flashlights.The following week, De Oliveira asked the director of IT at Mar-a-Lago, described as “Trump Employee 4” but understood to be Yuscil Taveras, how long surveillance footage was stored for and then told him “the boss” wanted the server deleted.When the director of IT replied that he did not know how to delete the server and suggested De Oliveira ask the security supervisor at the Trump Organization, De Olivera again insisted that “the boss” wanted the server deleted, the indictment said.De Oliveira’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.For months, prosecutors in the office of the special counsel have viewed the surveillance footage at Mar-a-Lago as key to the case because it showed Nauta removing boxes of classified documents out of the storage room just before Trump’s lawyer was scheduled to search for any classified documents after receiving a subpoena.The close detail about the scheme to delete the server added to the evidence of Trump’s alleged efforts to obstruct the criminal investigation by concealing classified documents from that Trump lawyer, Evan Corcoran.Trump asked Corcoran something to the effect of “What happens if we just don’t respond at all?” and “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?”, according to Corcoran’s notes that prosecutors obtained during the investigation.Ordinarily off limits to prosecutors, the notes came before the Washington grand jury hearing evidence in the case after a US appeals court pierced the attorney-client privilege Trump would otherwise have and ordered Corcoran to turn them over.Corcoran then told Trump that he would return on 2 June 2022 to look in the Mar-a-Lago storage room for documents. In the intervening period, the indictment said, Trump instructed Nauta to remove boxes containing classified documents from where Corcoran intended to search.Corcoran recounted in his notes that Trump also made a “funny motion” when they were discussing whether Corcoran should take the 38 documents back with him to his hotel. As Corcoran described it, Trump seemed to indicate he should “pluck” any documents that were “bad”, without saying it explicitly.The former president faces more than three dozen total charges in the case, including more than 30 violations of the Espionage Act. His trial is set for May 2024, at the end of the Republican presidential primary contest in which Trump is currently the frontrunner.A Trump spokesperson said the new charges were “nothing more than a continued desperate and flailing attempt” by the Biden administration “to harass President Trump and those around him”.The case is one of many compounding legal troubles that Trump faces as he vies for the Oval Office again. He faces possible additional indictments in Washington over his role in the January 6 insurrection and in Georgia over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. In April, he was charged with 34 felony counts related to a hush-money scheme involving the adult film star Stormy Daniels. In May, a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E Jean Carroll.In Fulton county, Georgia, a decision is expected shortly from prosecutor Fani Willis on whether to charge Trump over a phone call in which he attempted to push Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” him enough votes to win the 2020 election. More

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      US-Saudi talks amid reports of far-reaching diplomatic plan for Middle East

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      The US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has held talks with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in Jeddah, in what was reported to be part of a bid for an ambitious and far-reaching diplomatic breakthrough in the region.The White House said Sullivan and the prince discussed on Thursday “initiatives to advance a common vision for a more peaceful, secure, prosperous and stable Middle East region interconnected with the world”.A New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, said that based on an interview with Joe Biden last week, he believed Sullivan went to Jeddah to “explore the possibility of some kind of US-Saudi-Israeli-Palestinian understanding”.The deal would amount to a grand bargain involving a US-Saudi security pact and the normalisation of Saudi-Israel diplomatic relations, in which recognition of Israel would be exchanged, on Washington’s insistence, on some improvement in the plight of Palestinians in the occupied territories, such as a halt to Jewish settlement building, and a promise never to annex the West Bank.Friedman said Biden had yet to make up his mind whether to proceed and the talks in Jeddah were exploratory. Any such deal, he said, would be “time-consuming, difficult and complex”.Bruce Riedel, a former CIA Middle East analyst and White House adviser, said the idea of such a multifaceted agreement was politically far-fetched.“The Saudis don’t want to see Joe Biden re-elected. They strongly prefer Donald Trump being back in the White House. He never questioned them on human rights issues, he supported the Yemen war 100%, he did nothing to them after [Washington Post columnist and Saudi dissident] Jamal Khashoggi was murdered,” Riedel said.“So there is a big question mark about why would the Saudis do something which would be so beneficial to Joe Biden. I don’t see that in the works, and I would assume the Biden people are smart enough to recognise this.”Getting the Senate to approve a security pact with Saudi Arabia would also be extremely difficult. Republicans would not want to help Biden achieve diplomatic progress and most Democrats would resist US commitments to a Saudi monarchy with such a bad human rights record, and demand substantial gains for the Palestinians, which Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-rightwing Israeli government would not accept.Khaled Elgindy, a Palestinian expert at the Middle East Institute, said that the extremists in Netanyahu’s cabinet would “shoot down” proposals of a settlement freeze and territorial transfers within the West Bank to Palestinian Authority control, “never mind taking substantive steps toward a two-state solution, which is simply not on the table”.“The other aspect of this that I find unsettling is the way it totally sidesteps Palestinian interests and even Palestinian agency,” Elgindy said. “It’s like we’ve gone back to the days when the US, Israel and Arab states could decide the fate of Palestinians without any Palestinian involvement. This alone should disqualify it from being taken seriously – but of course it won’t.”Friedman said Saudi demands would include guarantees that the US would come to the kingdom’s defence if attacked, that Washington would allow a US-monitored Saudi civil nuclear programme, and that the kingdom could buy an advanced US air defence system, Thaad.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMatt Duss, former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, called the first demand a “non-starter” and the second and third “very bad ideas”.“Biden is weighing a world historical sucker’s bet,” Duss said on social media.Kirsten Fontenrose, a former senior director for the Gulf at the national security council during the Donald Trump administration, was also pessimistic about the chances for success.“I expect the Palestinian Authority to refuse to recognise a Saudi-Israel peace deal … the Israeli government to refuse a promise never to annex; the US Congress to refuse a collective defense pact with Saudi Arabia; the Saudi leadership to refuse to agree publicly never to weaponise their nuclear programme as long as Iran is close to doing so,” Fontenrose said. Riedel said there were more modest diplomatic gains to be won from engagement with the Saudi leadership, such as a further winding down of the conflict in Yemen, and Saudi aid to the occupied territories in the effort to forestall a third intifada, a Palestinian uprising against the expansion of settlements and other measures from an extreme Israeli government.The White House said that in his Jeddah talks, Sullivan had “reviewed significant progress to build on the benefits of the truce in Yemen that have endured over the past 16 months and welcomed ongoing UN-led efforts to bring the war to a close”. More

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      Trump says lawyers were given no indication of looming indictment from DoJ – live

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      From 4h agoDonald Trump said his attorneys had a “productive” meeting with the Department of Justice this morning, and that “no indication of notice” was given during the meeting.Posting on Truth Social, Trump wrote:
      My attorneys had a productive meeting with the DOJ this morning, explaining in detail that I did nothing wrong, was advised by many lawyers, and that an Indictment of me would only further destroy our Country. No indication of notice was given during the meeting — Do not trust the Fake News on anything!
      It was reported earlier today that Trump’s lawyers were seen entering the offices of special counsel Jack Smith, a week after the former president said he had received a target letter from Smith. According to NBC, Trump’s attorneys were told to expect an indictment against him.The grand jury conducting special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss has left the federal courthouse in Washington.Just before 3pm EST, a deputy clerk at the courthouse told journalists that no indictments had been returned on Thursday and that none were expected by the end of the day.According to a Politico report, anticipation was palpable at the courthouse throughout the day.
      Throngs of journalists crowded hallways and looked for signs of movement in the vicinity of the courthouse’s sealed grand jury spaces. Trump’s announcement that his lawyers had met with Smith’s team earlier in the day further fueled speculation that an indictment was imminent.
      The media encampment outside the D.C. courthouse continued to grow through the day Thursday, despite the sweltering heat.
      Vice-President Kamala Harris expressed deep concern over the attempted army coup in Niger during a call with Nigeria’s president, Bola Tinubu, the White House said in a statement.The statement reads:
      The vice president strongly condemned any efforts to seize power by force in Niger, and emphasized that our substantial cooperation with the government of Niger is contingent on Niger’s continued commitment to democratic standards.
      Harris and Tinubu committed to “defending democracy” in west Africa and the Sahel, it said.Niger’s president, Mohamed Bazoum, remained held in the presidential palace this afternoon and it was unclear who had taken charge of the country, after a group of soldiers declared a military coup on Wednesday evening.Rightwingers have long cried foul over Hunter Biden’s treatment by federal authorities.The pardon power is established in article 2 of the US constitution, which says the president “shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States, except in cases of impeachment”.The use of the pardon power has become increasingly controversial; presidents including Bill Clinton and Donald Trump having bestowed pardons and acts of clemency on donors and supporters.Trump was widely reported to have considered whether he could pardon himself, on issues including alleged collusion with Russian interference in the 2016 election.Trump also reportedly explored the idea of giving preemptive pardons to family members, another step he did not ultimately take.Joe Biden will not pardon his son Hunter on tax- and gun-related charges, the White House said on Thursday.At a briefing, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked: “From a presidential perspective, is there any possibility that the president would end up pardoning his son?”“No,” Jean-Pierre replied. Pressed, she said:
      I just said no. I answered.
      In court in Wilmington, Delaware, on Wednesday, Hunter Biden pleaded not guilty to two tax charges, both misdemeanours. He had been expected to plead guilty as part of a deal with federal prosecutors that also included a pre-trial diversion program on the guns charge, a felony.Donald Trump confirmed earlier today that his lawyers met with officials at the office of special prosecutor Jack Smith in Washington DC.Trump’s attorneys attended the meeting not to argue the facts of the case against indicting the former president, but instead with a broader appeal that indicting him would only cause more turmoil in the country’s political environment, CNN is reporting, citing two sources.In other justice department news, the Guardian’s Erum Salam reports that it will investigate Memphis’s police department after the beating death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of officers earlier this year:The US Department of Justice has announced an investigation into the city of Memphis and the Memphis police department over its policing practices to examine if they are discriminatory.The civil pattern or practice investigation will determine if Memphis police violated federal laws or the US constitution. The announcement comes after the police department came under scrutiny for its use of force, stops, searches and arrests that often targeted people of color.One of these instances involved Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who died on 10 January, three days after an encounter with Memphis police during a traffic stop in which he was violently beaten.Republican senator Ted Cruz gave a taste of how Donald Trump’s defenders could react if special counsel Jack Smith indicts the former president over his involvement in the January 6 insurrection:Here are his comments to the conservative Newsmax network:In the House, Republicans vowed that today would be the day they vote to hold Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt, but then changed their mind. The Guardian’s Mary Yang reports on why:Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, is no stranger to Capitol Hill, where he has sparred with Republicans and Democrats over how he runs his platforms. A Republican-led panel was set to vote on Thursday on a resolution to hold him in contempt of Congress, for allegedly failing to turn over internal documents on content moderation.However, House judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan, a Republican of Ohio, temporarily suspended the vote.Jordan announced on Twitter that the committee “decided to hold contempt in abeyance. For now” and posted a series of tweets of alleged internal communications among Meta executives hours ahead of the hearing.A day after Hunter Biden’s agreement with prosecutors to resolve federal charges was upended by a judge, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Joe Biden would not consider pardoning his son, CNN reports:Yesterday, federal judge Maryellen Noreika unexpectedly rejected a deal that would have seen Hunter Biden plead guilty to charges related to failure to pay taxes, and enter a diversion program to resolve lying in a background check to purchase a firearm. Prosecutors and Biden’s attorneys are now expected to negotiate a new agreement that will address concerns Noreika raised about the orgininal’s scope, and present it to the judge within 30 days.Republicans have for years seized on Biden’s history of addiction and troubled business dealings to argue that both he and his father are corrupt, though they have struggled to find proof of their allegations.The wait to find out whether Donald Trump will be charged over the January 6 insurrection continues, as Politico reports that the federal court in Washington DC says no indictments are expected to be filed today: More

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      White House rules out Joe Biden pardon for son Hunter

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      Joe Biden will not pardon his son Hunter on tax- and gun-related charges, the White House said on Thursday.At a briefing, the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, was asked: “From a presidential perspective, is there any possibility that the president would end up pardoning his son?”“No,” Jean-Pierre replied.Pressed, she said: “I just said no. I answered.”In court in Wilmington, Delaware, on Wednesday, Hunter Biden pleaded not guilty to two tax charges, both misdemeanours. He had been expected to plead guilty as part of a deal with federal prosecutors also including a pre-trial diversion program on the guns charge, a felony.In the event, a question from the judge about the scope of the deal led to its delay.Republicans claim Hunter Biden’s business affairs, and personal problems including public struggles with addiction, show Joe Biden to be corrupt and worthy of impeachment.Rightwingers have long cried foul over the younger Biden’s treatment by federal authorities.The pardon power is established in article 2 of the US constitution, which says the president “shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States, except in cases of impeachment”.The use of the pardon power has become increasingly controversial, presidents including Bill Clinton and Donald Trump having bestowed pardons and acts of clemency on donors and supporters.Trump was widely reported to have considered whether he could pardon himself, on issues including alleged collusion with Russian interference in the 2016 election.Trump also reportedly explored the idea of giving pre-emptive pardons to family members, another step he did not ultimately take.Now, Trump faces 71 criminal indictments and the prospect of more. As he seeks the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, most observers expect his lawyers to seek to draw out such legal battles in the hope he or another Republican in the White House will seize the pardon power.State-level indictments, however, are not subject to presidential pardons. In New York, Trump faces 34 criminal charges over hush-money payments to a porn star during the 2016 election. In Georgia, he is expected to be indicted over his election subversion in 2020.On Wednesday, Jean-Pierre told reporters Hunter Biden was “a private citizen”, and called his legal problems “a personal matter for him”.“As we have said, the president [and] the first lady, they love their son, and they support him as he continues to rebuild his life. This case was handled independently, as all of you know, by the justice department under the leadership of a prosecutor appointed by the former president.”Biden has used the pardon power sparingly, focusing largely on convictions for offenses relating to drugs.In four years in office, Trump issued 143 pardons and 94 commutations. Many were highly controversial, including pardons for his advisers Steve Bannon, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort.The Pew Research Center, however, points out that an analysis of justice department data shows Trump “used his executive clemency power less frequently than nearly every other president since the turn of the 20th century”. More