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Tim Walz to join Kamala Harris for the first time on the campaign trial in Philadelphia – live
The rally will mark Walz’s first official campaign appearance since Harris selected him as her running mate earlier today, and for Walz will serve as an introduction to the country.“I couldn’t be prouder to be on this ticket, and to help make Kamala Harris the next president of the United States,” he is expected to say, according to the campaign, which shared excerpts from his prepared remarks.The Minnesota governor will share about his upbringing in Butte, Nebraska – a small town of 400 – as well as his experiences as a teacher and an elected official.“I am more optimistic than ever before,” Shapiro said – capturing a truly dizzying vibe shift among Democrats over the past two weeks.In Philadelphia, Shapiro also referenced the city’s history as the birthplace of American independence.“In Independence Hall, just a couple miles from here, nearly two and a half centuries ago,” Shapiro said, the founders declared independence from the British crown. “They came together to declare our independence from a king and we’re not going back to a king,” he said.An riled-up crowd is now chanting “He’s a weirdo” – referencing Tim Walz’s now iconic characterizations of Donald Trump and JD Vance.“Tim Walz, in his beautiful midwestern plainspoken way, he summed up JD Vance the best. He’s a weirdo,” Shapiro said, encouraging the crowd.Earlier, Senator John Fetterman had referenced the same, effectively pithy insult.“This election is about moving our country forward with Vice-President Harris and Governor Walz. Or a couple of really, really, really, really weird dudes,” Fetterman said.” “And look, I gotta tell you, I work with JD Vance … and I’m here to confirm that he is a seriously weird dude.”“Let me tell you about my friend Kamala Harris, someone I’ve been friends with for two decades,” Shapiro said. “She is courtroom tough. She has a big heart and she is battle tested and ready to go.”Shapiro is speaking to a riled-up crowd. “Not going back! Not going back!” the crowd chanted, as he brought up Donald Trump’s record.“It was more chaos, fewer jobs and less freedom,” Shapiro said.“I love you Philly!” Shapiro began. ““I love being your governor. You all fill my heart and I love you so much.”Shapiro was considered a frontrunner for Harris’s running mate, along with Walz.The rally will mark Walz’s first official campaign appearance since Harris selected him as her running mate earlier today, and for Walz will serve as an introduction to the country.“I couldn’t be prouder to be on this ticket, and to help make Kamala Harris the next president of the United States,” he is expected to say, according to the campaign, which shared excerpts from his prepared remarks.The Minnesota governor will share about his upbringing in Butte, Nebraska – a small town of 400 – as well as his experiences as a teacher and an elected official.At the Liacouras Center at Temple University in Philadelphia, crowds are filing in for a packed rally.Sisters Stephanie Ford, 54, and Diane Harris, 59, said they wouldn’t have believed it if someone told them one month ago they’d be at a rally to support the first Black woman to lead a major party’s presidential ticket.Harris – no relation to the vice-president – danced excitedly. She hadn’t seen people this excited to vote since Barack Obama in 2008. “It’s hope and change and newness,” she said. Ford, who runs a coffee shop, said she saw some of her customers in line on the way in.Both said they were hoping Harris picked their governor, Josh Shapiro, to be her running mate. “I was hoping it was him,” Ford said, as her sister nodded. “But now we get to keep him for ourselves.”Neither had heard much about the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, who Harris announced on Tuesday would be her running mate. But they both said they liked what they were learning about him, especially what he’s done to help children in the state.“I trust her judgement,” said Harris. “It was a win-win for us.”Soon, Harris and Walz will appear together at a campaign rally in Philadelphia, which thousands of people are lining up to attend.On Instagram Live, progressive representative Alexandra Ocasio Cortez said that Walz has helped unify Democrats.“It’s really kind of nuts,” she said. “I am trying to think about the last time Senator Manchin and I, respectfully, were on the same side of an issue.”Walz is hardly a leftist. But in Minnesota, progressives who’ve clashed with him on policy issues are nonetheless rooting for him, my colleague Rachel Leingang reported:
Elianne Farhat, the executive director of TakeAction MN, said she and her organization had disagreed deeply with Walz over the years, but that he was a person who will move and change his position based on feedback. He evolves.
She and others pointed to his position on guns. Walz is a gun owner and a hunter who previously received endorsements and donations from the National Rifle Association and had an A rating from the group. But he shifted: he gave donations from the group to charity after the mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017, and he supported an assault weapons ban after the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. While governor, he has signed bills into law that restrict guns. He now has an F rating from the NRA.
‘We’re not electing our saviors. We’re not electing perfect people. We’re electing people who we can make hard decisions with, we can negotiate with, and who are serious about getting things done for people. And Governor Walz has shown that pretty strongly the last couple years as governor of Minnesota,’ Farhat said.
The Harris campaign said it has raised more than $10m from grassroots supporters since announcing Tim Walz as the vice-president’s running mate.The campaign released a video of Harris calling Walz to ask him to be her running mate.Here is where this eventful day in US politics stands so far:The Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, has selected Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz, the governor of Minnesota, and Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, were reportedly the two finalists in Harris’s search for a running mate.
Harris and Walz will soon appear at a campaign rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, marking their first joint event since the running mate announcement. After the Philadelphia rally, Harris and Walz are scheduled to appear at a series of events in battleground states across the country in the coming days.
Harris said she chose Walz because of his “convictions on fighting for middle-class families”. “We are going to build a great partnership,” Harris said on Instagram. “We are going to build a great team. We are going to win this election.”
Walz thanked Harris for “the honor of a lifetime” by choosing him. “I’m all in,” Walz said on X. “Vice President Harris is showing us the politics of what’s possible. It reminds me a bit of the first day of school. So, let’s get this done, folks!”
Republicans attacked Walz as extreme, while Democrats praised him as a down-to-earth leader who can achieve change. “Tim Walz is a dangerously liberal extremist, and the Harris-Walz California dream is every American’s nightmare,” the Trump campaign said in a statement. But Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic House speaker, rejected that characterization. “He’s right down the middle,” Pelosi told MSNBC. “He’s a heartland-of-America Democrat.”
Meanwhile, Donald Trump will participate in a “major interview” with billionaire and X owner Elon Musk on Monday, the former president announced in a social media post. The announcement comes one week after Trump’s calamitous interview at the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, where he questioned Kamala Harris’s race.
The blog will have more coming up, so stay tuned.Hello from the Liacouras Center at Temple University in Philadelphia, where Kamala Harris will debut the freshly formed Democratic ticket later this afternoon.The line to enter wrapped around the university for blocks, and supporters braved a downpour and some sticky summer weather to get inside.There was plenty of excitement among the crowd. Spotted on my way in: several students wearing chartreuse-colored “Kamala is Brat” shirts. Another woman wore a shirt with the play on words “About Madam time” to celebrate the possibility of sending the first woman to the White House.Donald Trump will participate in a “major interview” with billionaire and X owner Elon Musk on Monday, the former president announced in a social media post.“ON MONDAY NIGHT I’LL BE DOING A MAJOR INTERVIEW WITH ELON MUSK — Details to follow!” Trump wrote in a post shared to Truth Social.The announcement comes one week after Trump’s calamitous interview at the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, where he questioned Kamala Harris’ race.The NABJ interview was initially supposed to be an hour long, but it ended after just 34 minutes, as the audience jeered many of Trump’s responses. He will likely face an easier audience with Musk.Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, was having some fun at Republicans’ expense this afternoon, after Kamala Harris announced Tim Walz as her running mate.Some Republicans have accused Harris of passing over Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor, for the running mate spot because of his Jewish faith. If chosen, Shapiro could have become the first Jewish American to serve as vice president.The rightwing commentator Erick Erickson said on X, “No Jews allowed at the top of the Democratic Party.”Schumer, who is the first Jewish American to lead the Senate as majority leader, responded to Erickson by saying: “News to me.”Democrats also note that Harris is married to a Jewish man, Doug Emhoff, who could become the first Jewish spouse of a US president if the party wins the White House in November.Kamala Harris’s campaign has released a new video introducing Tim Walz to the country, as most Americans are not yet familiar with the Minnesota governor.The video, which is narrated by Walz, recounts his upbringing in Nebraska and his decision to join the national guard before he became a teacher and eventually a lawmaker.The video, as well as Walz’s scheduled campaign appearances in battleground states over the coming days, will provide many Americans with their first impression of Harris’s new running mate. A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll showed that only 13% of Americans knew enough about Walz to register an opinion of him.Here is the full transcript of the video:
Sometimes life is as much about the lessons you learn as the lessons you teach.
Where I grew up, community was a way of life.
My high school class was 24 people.
I was related to half of them.
I learned to be generous toward my neighbors, compromise without compromising my values, and to work for the common good.
My dad was in the army, and with his encouragement, I joined the army national guard when I was 17. I served for 24 years.
I used my GI benefits to go to college and become a public school teacher.
I coached football and taught social studies for 20 years.
And I tried to teach my students what small-town Nebraska taught me: respect, compromise and service to country.
And so when I went into government, that’s what I carried with me. I worked with Republicans to pass an infrastructure bill. Cut taxes for working families. Signed paid leave into law. I codified abortion rights after Roe got overturned.
Because I go to work for the common good.
But enough about me.
Let’s talk about you. Because that’s what this election is about.
It’s about your future. It’s about your family.
And Vice-President Harris knows that. She too grew up in a middle-class family. She too goes to work every day, making sure families can not just get by but get ahead.
We believe in the promise of America. In those values I learned in Nebraska. And we’re ready to fight for them.
Because as Kamala Harris says: when we fight we win.
Outside Tim Walz’s residence in St Paul, TV cameras lined the street, with reporters doing live shots to explain how their governor had been tapped as Kamala Harris’s running mate.Earlier in the morning, some supporters gathered to send off Walz with cheers as a black SUV whisked him off to the vice-presidential campaign trail, the local CBS outlet reported.Midday, people on their morning walks and bike rides slowed down, trying to figure out what was happening that required so many cameras. Some took photos of the house, with grins on their faces. A car drove by, honking excitedly at the people gathered.Terryann Nash, who lives across the street from the residence, said she saw security details increasing in recent weeks and wondered what was going on. The residence Walz is staying at is not the state’s governor’s mansion, which is under construction, but a mansion that once housed the University of Minnesota’s president.Nash, a teacher, was excited to see a fellow teacher on the ticket. “Even as a governor, he’s always come back to the schools. He’s always been in touch with the teachers. I feel like we’ve got a well-represented voice and a very good heart to send us off,” she said.Tim Walz won plaudits from fellow Democrats for championing a new and surprisingly effective attack line against Republicans: they’re “just weird”.“There’s something wrong with people when they talk about freedom: freedom to be in your bedroom, freedom to be in your exam room, freedom to tell your kids what they can read,” Walz said recently on MSNBC. “That stuff is weird. They come across weird. They seem obsessed with this.”Speaking at a Harris campaign event before he was named as her running mate, Walz told supporters, “The fascists depend on fear. The fascists depend on us going back. But we’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.”Other prominent Democrats, including Harris, have now embraced the attack line. Watch this video showing the many examples of Walz’s “weird” strategy: More - in US Politics
Tim Walz: charismatic running mate to help Harris make case against Trump
As Democrats weathered the upheaval caused by Joe Biden’s decision to end his re-election campaign and hand the reins to his vice-president, Kamala Harris, a party stalwart piped up with a suggestion: start calling Donald Trump “weird”.The pioneer of the attack, which was also deployed by Harris’s campaign, was Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who insisted to CNN that “it’s not a name-calling or tagging him with it. It’s an observation.”“And I didn’t come up with it,” he added, noting that he had heard “relatives and Republicans” use the adjective to describe the former president.Walz is now expected to spend the next three months telling the country all about the weirdness of Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance, after Harris named the Minnesota governor as her pick for vice-president on Tuesday. Although the 60-year-old is one of the least nationally known of the options Harris was considering, and does not hail from a state viewed as crucial to deciding the election, he is expected to assist Harris in making the case for her policies, and convincing voters to reject the extreme remaking of the US government that Trump says is required.Now in his second term as governor, the former congressman and high school teacher brings to the ticket a record of progressive policymaking, a somewhat sympathetic view towards pro-Palestine protesters, and a distinctly Minnesotan style of communication the campaign could use in its efforts to win the nearby swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.“If Donald Trump and JD Vance are irritated that Kamala Harris smiles and laughs, they’re really going to be irritated by Tim Walz,” Melissa Hortman, the Democratic speaker of Minnesota’s house of representatives, told the Guardian.“He is a cheerful person, he’s a positive, upbeat person, he’s charismatic. He can get a crowd going.”Walz emerged as Harris’s pick after a search lasting two weeks that saw the vice-president also consider a group that included Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and Arizona senator Mark Kelly. The choice of Walz drew praise from across the Democratic party’s ideological spectrum.Progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Harris made an “excellent decision”, while Joe Manchin, the West Virginia senator who recently left the party and is best known for hamstringing Biden’s proposals to fight child poverty and more aggressively combat climate change, said: “I can think of no one better than governor Walz to help bring our country closer together and bring balance back to the Democratic party.”Republicans responded to Walz’s selection by posting on social media images of the protests the rocked Minneapolis four years ago after George Floyd’s murder, reminders of the governor’s support for a law allowing undocumented migrants to obtain driver’s licenses, plus a massive Covid relief scandal that took place during his administration.With Trump making fears of crime and unrest a centerpiece of his platform, Amy Koch, a Minnesota Republican strategist and former state senate majority leader, said the unrest that followed Floyd’s killing will likely form a plank of the party’s counter-attack to Walz’s candidacy.“There’s a lot of video of five days of chaos in Minneapolis,” Koch told the Guardian. “There’s a lot of video of, like, literally, reporters covering it, saying: where is governor Walz?” The governor did deploy the national guard, but Republicans say he did not do so soon enough.Walz’s main competitor for the spot of running mate was Shapiro, who may have reignited tensions among Democrats over his policy positions on issues such as education, fracking and Israel-Gaza.Biden’s support for Benjamin Netanyahu and the invasion of Gaza sparked a backlash that some of his allies feared could have cost him victory in swing states such as Michigan, home to a large Arab-American population. Some pro-Palestine activists have signaled a willingness to give Harris a chance to win back their votes, but were wary of Shapiro, who took a hardline stance against pro-Palestinian protests.The backlash to his potential candidacy, which included the formation of a group called “No Genocide Josh”, itself attracted claims of antisemitism, with many pointing out that Shapiro, who is Jewish, has condemned Netanyahu and that Walz has a similar record of support for Israel and campus protests.Walz took a different rhetorical tack on other protests. When tens of thousands of Minnesotans voted “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary in protest against the Biden administration’s policies towards Gaza, his response was warm, with the governor calling them “civically engaged”.“They are asking to be heard and that’s what they should be doing,” Walz said at the time. “Their message is clear that they think this is an intolerable situation and that we can do more. And I think the president is hearing that.”After his selection, the pro-Palestine group IfNotNow said it remained “concerned” by Walz’s past association with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) and votes in Congress to approve military aid to the Israel.Supporters of Shapiro had argued that putting him on the ticket would help Harris win Pennsylvania, perhaps the most crucial swing state this election. But Christopher J Devine, a political science professor at the University of Dayton, said his research showed there was no guarantee of that happening.The choice of running mate was the last major piece of unfinished business before Harris, who quickly consolidated the support necessary to become the presumptive Democratic nominee after Biden withdrew last month.As hotly anticipated as Harris’s decision was, Devine said it was unlikely to prove decisive in beating Trump and Vance.“VPs can have an effect on the election. It’s not always in the way we expect, and the magnitude of that effect tends not to be very large,” said Devine, the author of Do Running Mates Matter? The Influence of Vice Presidential Candidates in Presidential Elections.If elected, Harris would be the first female president and the first south Asian president, and only the second African American, after Barack Obama. Her shortlist of running mates was composed entirely of white men after the Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer said she was not interested in the job.While Devine said that may have been a calculation on Harris’s part – besides Obama, every US president has been a white man – he said it did not mean she had no choice but to select a running mate from that demographic.“Kamala Harris could have chosen Gretchen Whitmer if she believed that there was strength in that identity of being a woman running for the presidency,” he said. “But I suspect her calculation, or a lot of her team, they might have weighed on her to … say that it just can’t be done. It’s too much for people to handle.”Trump has made dissatisfaction with both the Biden administration and the country’s entire direction a theme of his campaign, going so far as to say that the country is being “destroyed”. William G Howell, director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Effective Government, said Walz will be put in a position to articulate the case against that worldview.“His is the language of us coming together and … setting to work on hard problems,” Howell said. “And so, both in tone and in substance, he’s going to be able to clearly distinguish himself from from the kind of rhetoric emanating from Trump.” More
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Ex-Trump attorney agrees to cooperate in Arizona fake electors case
Jenna Ellis, Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign attorney charged in Arizona as part of the fake electors scheme, has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for getting her charges dismissed.Arizona’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, announced the deal on Monday, sharing a legal agreement that shows Ellis agreed to sit for interviews and turn over documents related to the scheme. The agreement also calls on Ellis to “testify completely and truthfully at any time and any place requested by the Arizona attorney general’s office”.In exchange, Ellis will avoid potential jail time for her role in the scheme.“This agreement represents a significant step forward in our case,” Mayes said in a statement. “I am grateful to Ms Ellis for her cooperation with our investigation and prosecution. Her insights are invaluable and will greatly aid the state in proving its case in court.”In Arizona, 18 people were charged – the 11 people who falsely attested that Trump had won the state’s electors, and seven others from Trump’s circle who helped coordinate the scheme.Ellis previously pleaded guilty in Georgia to one count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings in that state’s election subversion case. Her plea deal in Georgia resulted in five years’ probation, a fine and community service in exchange for cooperating with prosecutors. Her plea came quickly after two others pleaded guilty in the case, and she subsequently had her law license suspended.Documents filed in the Arizona case cite the Georgia plea agreement, saying that it was “in the interest of justice” for the judge to accept the Arizona deal because it comes from “the same conspiracy charged in this case”.Ellis, and the others indicted in the Arizona case, faced nine felony charges related to fraud, forgery and conspiracy. All pleaded not guilty.Arizona is one of seven states where Trump and his allies sought to install “alternate” electors who claimed Trump won in their states. In five of the states, prosecutors have worked to bring charges against at least some of those involved. More
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From RFK Jr’s dead bear to a shot dog, why do US politicians keep throwing us red meat?
I had never really engaged with how spooky Robert F Kennedy Jr looked until I saw him describe, in a video, the circumstances in which he ended up driving around with a dead baby bear in his boot. It sounds a lot more like an anxiety dream than a thing that happened, but here you go: the independent US presidential candidate had been taking some people falconing in the Hudson valley, in 2014, when he saw a woman hit and kill a bear with her van.Kennedy decided to skin and eat it, so he picked it up, only remembering later that he didn’t have time to do either of those things, because he was going out for dinner in New York and taking a flight straight after. Can’t take a dead bear cub on a flight. He had bought only hold luggage and this was carrion. Sorry.He dumped the cub in Central Park, New York, putting a bicycle on top of it, hoping to incriminate a mystery cyclist, because that is exactly what would happen if you cycled into a bear – you would place your bike on top of it, then scarper. Even though Central Park is bear-free, and the police quickly determined the bike was a red herring and established the cause of death as a traffic collision, no further action was taken.The story remained buried, with the bear, until the New Yorker got wind of it and smoked out Kennedy’s account while fact-checking a story. By posting the video, he shot their fox, if you like, but would never skin and eat that. Who would eat a metaphorical fox?If anyone would, it would be this guy. Vanity Fair recently published an old picture of Kennedy and an unidentified woman eating what looked a lot like a dog on a spit, verifying with a vet that it matched the canine rib formation. Kennedy denied this, saying that there were three things he would never eat – a person, a monkey or a dog – and that this was goat. Inconveniently, goats also have 13 pairs of ribs.This question – what you are prepared to kill and eat – feels alien to British political discussion, but has cropped up more than once in the US. Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, was a contender for Trump’s ticket until she wrote a memoir about killing a dog and a goat in a single day in horrific circumstances (she had to shoot the goat twice, with an interval while she went back to the truck to get another bullet).God knows, it helps nobody to relitigate the justice of the kills – suffice it to say that the dog’s crime was acting like a dog and the goat’s smelling like a goat. She said explicitly about the revelation that it was just the top line in a book full of “more real, honest and politically incorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping”; it was a blunt bit of message delivery, the message being: “I love guns, I’ll stand up to the kind of do-gooders who bleat on about cruelty and I love attention.” What else could a newly radicalised Republican party want in a vice president?Well, they want the kind of systems change that won’t be delivered by goats, culled ineffectually, one at a time. Get women back in the kitchen, then they will listen.Kennedy, his emphasis all on the eating, none on the killing, is tapping into a different strain of political self-fashioning: “Real men eat meat, only meat, any meat, as long as it’s big meat.” The Canadian culture warrior Jordan Peterson was its poster boy, although his daughter Mikhaila was the true prophet of the meat, salt and water diet, on YouTube and elsewhere. This reflects the broader trend that while meat-only diets generally end with a bit of primal and hypermasculinist philosophising, the box-office meatfluencers are predominantly women. It can’t be “incel”-adjacent if ladies are also into it. Except, don’t be fooled, it can.I’m just dreading the next phase, where the British “popular” “Conservatives” start to ape their American counterparts, as they always do, and the Instagram reel arrives of Liz Truss trapping a squirrel. The RSPCA had better be ready. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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Assassination again shows Netanyahu’s disregard for US-Israel relations
Standing alongside Donald Trump in Florida a week ago, Benjamin Netanyahu was vague on the latest prospect of a ceasefire in the war in Gaza.“I hope we are going to have a deal. Time will tell,” the Israeli prime minister said, two days after his controversial address to a joint session of the US Congress.Throughout his three-day visit to the US, Netanyahu was careful to avoid making any commitment to the deal Biden unveiled on 31 May. While the US insisted publicly that the onus was on Hamas to accept the plan, the administration knew it also needed to pin down Netanyahu personally over his reluctance to commit to a permanent ceasefire.Yet, according to US reports, it now appears that at the very time Netanyahu was publicly speculating about a deal, a remote-controlled bomb had already been smuggled into a guesthouse in Tehran, awaiting its intended target: Ismail Haniyeh, the senior Hamas leader who was assassinated on Wednesday night.Haniyeh, reported the New York Times and CNN, was killed by an explosive device placed in the guesthouse, where he was known to stay while visiting Iran and was under the protection of the powerful Revolutionary Guards. Iran and Hamas have blamed Israel for the attack, which Israel has neither confirmed nor denied. It fits a pattern of previous Israeli targeted killings on Iranian soil.If the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, is to be believed, Netanyahu never divulged any such plan to his American allies. The first Blinken knew of the assassination was when he was told in Singapore, after the event. Later that day he insisted he had been left blind-sided, almost as badly as Iranian intelligence.In Netanyahu’s defence, Israel has not confirmed the US media accounts, nor has it ever made any secret of its intention to kill the senior Hamas leadership as a reprisal for the 7 October attacks. And even as he spoke to Congress, the prime minister could not have known that the reported plan would work so well, or have such a devastating impact.However, the potential consequences of such an assassination were clear to all. It took the frustrated Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, to accuse Netanyahu of sabotage. “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?” he asked.In Washington, the national security council spokesperson John Kirby put on a brave face, claiming the ceasefire process had not been “completely torpedoed”, and insisting: “We still believe the deal on the table is worth pursuing”.The assassination underlines how the US is often left looking like the junior partner in the relationship with Israel, observers say. Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Bernie Sanders, said: “It is another case of Netanyahu putting up two fingers to Biden. There has been month after month after month of these just repeated affronts and humiliations from Netanyahu, culminating in this ridiculous moment last week, where he came and spoke in front of the Congress yet again, to undermine Biden’s ceasefire proposal. Yet Biden, who sets such store by personal relations, refuses to change course.”Duss has said that by refusing to control the supply of US weapons as a means of leverage with Israel, Biden has left Netanyahu free to pursue the war. Biden was left to ring Netanyahu two days after the assassination, and to promise to defend Israel from any threats from Iran and its proxy groups. If there was any private admonition or disapproval, the public read-out of the call concealed it.Biden later expressed his frustration, telling reporters: “We have the basis for a ceasefire. They should move on it now.” Asked if Haniyeh’s death had ruined the prospect of a deal, the president said: “It has not helped.”The killing is a further indicator of how the Biden administration cannot capitalise on a security relationship with a politician whose methods and objectives it does not share, and who it suspects wants its political rival to triumph in November’s US election. Moreover, both Trump and Netanyahu share a common goal – having political power to stave off criminal proceedings against themselves.At issue, too, is the effectiveness of Israel’s long-term military strategy for dismantling Hamas, including the use of assassinations on foreign soil.Haniyeh is the third prominent member of Iran-backed military groups to be killed in recent weeks, after the killing last month of the Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif in Gaza and the strike on the Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut, in turn a response to the killing of 12 children and teenagers in the Druze village of Majdal Shams.In total, according to ACLED, a US-based NGO, Israel has mounted 34 attacks that have led to the death of at least 39 commanders and senior members of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran in the past 10 months.Hugh Lovatt, a Middle East specialist at the European Council on Foreign Relations, describes the killings as a tactical victory, but a strategic defeat. “Haniyeh was a proponent of Palestinian reconciliation, and of a ceasefire. So taking him out of the equation has an impact on the internal power dynamics within the group by strengthening the hardliners, at least in the current term,” he said.Netanyahu, Lovatt added, was undermining Haniyeh “by going back on agreed positions and by being very vocal in saying as soon as the hostages were released we recommence fighting Hamas”.Nicholas Hopton, a former UK ambassador to Tehran, said he feared the assassination was part of a deliberate attempt to sabotage the hopes of the new Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, to rebuild relations with the west.“You can overstate what a reformer means in Iran – he went to the parliament wearing an IRGC uniform – but he was going to give relations with the west a go,” Hopton said. “I think the supreme leader is deeply sceptical it will lead anywhere but thought it was worth an attempt. Pezeshkian may now be stymied right away, and I think that’s what the Israeli assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran was partly designed to do.”Inside Iran, Mohammad Salari, the secretary general of the Islamic Solidarity party, said the killing should be seen as more than the removal of one political figure. The hidden purpose was to overshadow the new government’s policy of engagement and de-escalation, he said.“Netanyahu will use all his efforts to lay stones in the path of realising Iran’s balanced foreign policy, improving relations with European countries, and managing tension with the United States, just like during the nuclear negotiations.”So when the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah,threatened an open battle on all fronts, he probably meant, according to Lovatt, a multi-pronged response designed not to trigger a regional war, but to go further than the retaliation mounted by Iran alone in April. It was notable that Nasrallah added a plea to the White House: “If anybody in the world genuinely wants to prevent a more serious regional war, they must pressure Israel to stop its aggression on Gaza.”At the moment that plea lies unanswered. More
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Plea deal for accused 9/11 plotters revoked by Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin
The US secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, has revoked a plea deal for the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and two other defendants, reinstating them as death-penalty cases, according to a memo sent to Susan Escallier, who is overseeing the war court proceedings.The short-lived deal came 16 years after prosecution of the three men began.On Wednesday, Escallier announced that she signed a deal with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two of his accomplices, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi. Defense lawyers had requested that the men receive life sentences in exchange for the guilty pleas.In Friday’s memo, Austin argued that due to the “significance of the decision to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused in the above-referenced case, responsibility for such a decision should rest with me as the superior convening authority”.For some victims’ families, the deal Escallier entered into destroyed any chance of a full trial that could have ended in death sentences and given people the opportunity to address the men accused of killing their loved ones, according to the Washington Post.“I would have liked a trial of men who hadn’t been tortured, but we got handed a really poor opportunity for justice, and this is a way to verdicts and finality,” Terry Kay Rockefeller, 74, whose sister Laura was killed on 9/11, told the Post.News of the original plea deal elicited sharp criticism from Republican lawmakers, including Mitch McConnell and JD Vance, who decried the deal, and the New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who accused the Biden-Harris administration of betraying the American people.J Wells Dixon, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights who has represented defendants at Guantánamo Bay as well as other detainees there who have been cleared of any wrongdoing, had welcomed the plea bargains as the only feasible way to resolve the long-stalled and legally fraught 9/11 cases.Dixon accused Austin on Friday of “bowing to political pressure and pushing some victim family members over an emotional cliff” by rescinding the plea deals.Lawyers for the two sides have been exploring a negotiated resolution to the case for over a year. President Joe Biden blocked a proposed plea bargain in the case last year, when he refused to offer requested presidential guarantees that the men would be spared solitary confinement and provided trauma care for the torture they underwent while in CIA custody.A senior Pentagon official told the New York Times that the president and vice-president had no involvement in Austin’s decision to rescind the controversial deal.Mohammed and the other defendants had been expected to formally enter their pleas under the deal as soon as next week.Mohammed is accused of masterminding the plot to fly hijacked commercial passenger aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York and into the Pentagon. The 9/11 attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and plunged the United States into what would become a two-decade-long war in Afghanistan.The US military commission overseeing the cases of five defendants in the 9/11 attacks have been stuck in pre-trial hearings and other preliminary court action since 2008. The torture that the defendants underwent while in CIA custody has slowed the cases and left the prospect of full trials and verdicts still uncertain, in part because of the inadmissibility of evidence linked to the torture.Associated Press contributed to this report More
