Closing summary
We still don’t have all the answers about the recent spate of UFO shootdowns, but the US military announced it had recovered all of the Chinese spy balloon destroyed off South Carolina’s coast. As for the three other mysterious objects American warplanes downed over the US and Canada, there’s a compelling theory that one was a hobbyist’s balloon launched from Illinois. Speaking of the midwestern state, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, will head there next week to address a police union – just the type of thing a state politician with national aspirations would do.
Here’s what else happened today:
The justice department searched the offices of a group connected to Mike Pence, but found no new classified documents.
Joe Biden spoke out in support of John Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s Democratic senator who checked himself into a hospital for treatment of clinical depression.
Georgia’s Republican secretary of state is claiming vindication after a special grand jury unanimously found there was no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election.
Fox News’ biggest names never believed Donald Trump’s election fraud claims but parroted them anyway, newly released court filings show. This story has raised plenty of eyebrows – except for readers of the Wall Street Journal, a publication that shares ownership with the network and has yet to cover it.
On the new Index of Impunity, the US’s ranking is not particularly enviable.
Updated
With Roe v Wade overturned, the religious right is now pushing legislation in Republican-led states that would crack down on everything from drag queen performances to the sale of romance novels, Hallie Lieberman reports:
A wave of proposed legislation pushed by Republicans across the US at the state level is aimed at outlawing aspects of sexuality that could have a huge impact on Americans’ private lives and businesses.
Opponents of the laws before legislatures in various states say the planned new legislation could spawn prosecution of breast-pump companies in Texas for nipples on advertising, or a bookstore might be banned from selling romance novels in West Virginia, or South Carolina could imprison standup comics if a risque joke is heard by a young person.
The bills are part of a post-Roe nationwide strategy by the religious wing of the Republican party, now that federal abortion rights have fallen. They range from banning all businesses that sell sex-related goods to anti-drag queen bills. Tyler Dees, an Arkansas state senator who wrote an anti-porn bill, said: “I would love to outlaw it all,” referring to porn.
The most prevalent bills relate to age verification of sex-related websites. Seventeen states drafted porn age-verification bills, many inspired by Louisiana’s law that went into effect in January. Louisiana’s law requires websites featuring one-third or more pornographic content to check government-issued ID to verify users are 18 or older. Websites that don’t comply face civil penalties. Parents can sue a site if their kids access it.
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Joe Biden spoke out in support of Senator John Fetterman’s decision to seek hospital treatment for depression:
John, Gisele – Jill and I are thinking about your family today.
— President Biden (@POTUS) February 17, 2023
Millions of people struggle with depression every day, often in private.
Getting the care you need is brave and important. We're grateful to you for leading by example. https://t.co/V3rGZSKrM4
The White House press secretary also talked about the Democratic lawmaker’s decision in her briefing today:
Updated
Vice-president Kamala Harris along with a host of Democratic and Republican lawmakers are at the annual Munich security conference, where they heard a speech from Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Here’s what he had to say, from the Guardian’s Patrick Wintour:
The west needs to hurry up its support for Ukraine as Vladimir Putin will gain a military advantage unless arms deliveries and further sanctions arrive soon, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a video address to world leaders at a security conference in Munich in the face of mounting fears that Russia is planning a new offensive.
“We need to hurry up. We need speed – speed of our agreements, speed of our delivery … speed of decisions to limit Russian potential,” the Ukrainian president said. “There is no alternative to speed because it is speed that life depends on.”
He added: “Delay has always been and still is a mistake.”
His address came just days before the anniversary on 24 February of Moscow sending its forces into the country and unleashing the biggest war in Europe since the 1940s.
Zelenskiy warned that Russia was trying to mount an offensive, mainly in the south, partly by attacking civilian and energy infrastructure. Meanwhile, he said, neighbouring Belarus would make a mistake of historic proportions if it joined in the Russian offensive, and claimed surveys showed 80% of the country did not wish to join the war.
Trying to sound an optimistic note and taking up the theme of the conference, “David on the Dnipro”, Zelenskiy said his country had the courage to defeat Goliath with a slingshot. But for this to succeed, he said, the slingshot had to become stronger and faster. “Goliath has already started to lose. Goliath will definitely fall this year,” he said.
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Donald Trump tried to call into Fox News as the January 6 insurrection was occurring, but network executives turned him down, fearing he could make the situation worse, CNN reports.
The new details come from the documents containing communications between top Fox News personalities and officials that were made public yesterday as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against the network:
Buried in the Dominion filing: Donald Trump dialed into Lou Dobbs’ show on 1/6 trying to get on air but Fox would not let him. 1/6 committee didn’t know Trump had made this call, according to a source familiar with the panel’s work. pic.twitter.com/vGWl4Lbn5Y
— Annie Grayer (@AnnieGrayerCNN) February 17, 2023
Updated
Justice department searches Pence office, finds no classified documents
The justice department searched the offices of a conservative group connected to former vice-president Mike Pence as part of its investigation into his possession of classified documents, but found no additional items, Politico reports:
JUST IN: Pence spokesman says
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) February 17, 2023
"[DOJ] today completed a thorough and unrestricted search of Advancing American Freedom's office for several hours and found no new documents with classified markings. One binder with approximately three previously redacted documents was taken."
A person familiar with the search says the binder is believed to be related to Pence's 2020 debate prep. Pence had attorneys present throughout the search.
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) February 17, 2023
The presence of classified documents at Pence’s Indiana home was first revealed last month, and the Republican former vice-president said he would cooperate with government efforts to retrieve any material in his possession. Unlike with the cases involving Joe Biden and Donald Trump – both of whom were discovered to be in possession of secret government material, though in vastly different circumstances – the justice department has not appointed a special counsel to handle the investigation into Pence.
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Joe Biden’s former executive assistant will sit for an interview with House Republicans investigating the president’s possession of classified documents, CNN reports.
Kathy Chung was a staffer who in 2017 helped pack up Biden’s belongings at the end of his eight years as vice-president. Classified material dating to that stint in the White House, and to his time as senator, were among those found in his possession, sparking investigations by the justice department as well as the GOP-led House oversight committee, which will interview Chung.
Here’s more from CNN’s report:
Chung was one of the staffers who packed Biden’s belongings and documents at the end of his time as vice president, according to people familiar with the matter.
Those boxes eventually ended up at the Penn Biden Center and are now at the center of a special counsel investigation into the possible mishandling of classified info. A source close to Chung says she feels partly responsible for the situation.
Chung’s lawyer, Bill Taylor, told CNN … they have been in discussions with the Oversight Committee over the past week and have agreed to provide the committee with much of what it requested in a letter last month.
“She is happy to sit for an interview with the committee,” Taylor told CNN.
The committee made a broad request that asks for materials well beyond the Biden document investigation including all communications with the Biden family dating back to 2009. The panel also demanded all documents and communications “related to then-Vice President Biden’s departure from office in 2017, including communications regarding Penn Biden Center,” the letter notes.
Chung’s lawyer says there are limits on what they are willing to provide: “She is not agreeing to produce everything in the letter but would provide documents related to the movement of documents from the White House to the Penn Biden Center.”
Taylor has proposed several dates for a possible interview, but the final date has not been set.
Updated
More from Kamala Harris’s NBC interview, on her response to moves by Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, targeting the teaching of African American history.
DeSantis, 44, is widely expected to run for the Republican presidential nomination and is the only close challenger to Donald Trump in polling.
Harris is the first woman, the first Black American and the first South Asian American to be vice-president.
She said: “Any push to censor America’s teachers and tell them what they should be teaching in the best interest of our children … is, I think, wrongheaded.
“The people who know our children, are their parents and their teachers … and it should not be some politician saying what should be taught in our classrooms.”
Updated
Dismissing Washington “chatter” about whether Joe Biden should run for re-election in 2024 and whether her own party thinks she would be a suitable replacement if he does not, Kamala Harris said the president “has said he intends to run for re-election … and I intend to run with him as vice-president of the United States”.
Harris was speaking to NBC News at the Munich security conference.
Biden has not formally declared a run but all signs suggest that he will. On Thursday, the White House physician pronounced him “fit for duty, and [to] fully execute all of his responsibilities without any exemptions or accommodations”.
Also on Thursday, however, Politico reported concern among Democrats that at 80, and already the oldest president ever, Biden is too old to run for a second term, by the end of which he would be 86.
The site also reported that insiders believe Harris would not be a good presidential candidate herself.
Speaking to NBC, Harris said: “I think that it is very important to focus on the needs of the American people and not political chatter out of Washington DC.”
She was also asked about Nikki Haley, the 51-year-old former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador now running for the Republican presidential nomination, who has called for a “new generation” of leaders and said politicians over the age of 75 should be subject to mandatory mental health tests.
Haley’s only declared opponent for the Republican nomination, former president Donald Trump, is younger than Biden but only by four years. Haley has not said that Trump is too old.
Harris, 58, said Haley was using “very coded language”, adding: “What I know from traveling our country is that the American people want leaders who will see what’s going on in their lives and create solution.
“In Joe Biden, we have a president who is probably one of the boldest and strongest American presidents we have had in his response to the needs of the American people.”
Updated
The Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley told a New Hampshire audience a controversial “don’t say gay” education law signed by the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, does not go “far enough”.
“Basically what it said was you shouldn’t be able to talk about gender before third grade,” Haley said. “I’m sorry. I don’t think that goes far enough.”
DeSantis’s law bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity through third grade, in which children are eight or nine years old. The law has proved hugely controversial, stoking confrontation with progressives but also corporations key to the Florida economy, Disney prominent among them.
Some pediatric psychologists say the law could harm the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth already more likely to face bullying and attempt suicide than other children.
Haley, a former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, this week became the second declared major candidate for the Republican nomination in 2024, after Donald Trump.
Widely expected to run, DeSantis is the only candidate who challenges Trump in polling. Surveys have shown Haley in third place, with the potential to split the anti-Trump vote and hand the nomination to the former president.
New Hampshire will stage the first primary of the Republican race. In Exeter on Thursday, Haley said: “There was all this talk about the Florida bill – the ‘don’t say gay bill’. Basically what it said was you shouldn’t be able to talk about gender before third grade. I’m sorry. I don’t think that goes far enough.
“When I was in school you didn’t have sex ed until seventh grade. And even then, your parents had to sign whether you could take the class. That’s a decision for parents to make.”
As reported by Fox News, Haley also said Republicans should “focus on new generational leadership” by putting “a badass woman in the White House”.
Full story…
Updated
In California, the Guardian’s Kira Lerner reports lawmakers are considering a proposal that would allow citizens to vote while incarcerated for felonies in state and federal prisons. Advocates for the measure see it as crucial for racial justice, since the state’s prison population is disproportionately non-white:
Before having his sentence commuted by Governor Gavin Newsom last year, Thanh Tran served 10 and a half years in prisons and jails across California, a time he described as the “most traumatizing and dehumanizing experience of my life”.
Had he been able to vote during that time, he said he would have maintained some hope that his community still cared about him.
“The focus of incarceration right now in California is about punishment, but if I had the ability to vote, it would still create that tie to the community,” said Tran, now a policy associate with the Oakland-based Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. It would be like the community saying, “Thanh, we still care about you out here,” he said. “We know your sentence will one day end and we want you to return home and be a good neighbor to us.”
Updated
The day so far
We still don’t have all the answers about the recent spate of UFO shootdowns, but the US military announced it had recovered all of the Chinese spy balloon destroyed off South Carolina’s coast. As for the three other mysterious objects American warplanes downed over the US and Canada, there’s a compelling theory that one was a hobbyist’s balloon launched from Illinois. Speaking of the midwestern state, Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis will head there next week to address a police union – just the type of thing a state politician with national aspirations would do.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Georgia’s Republican secretary of state is claiming vindication after a special grand jury unanimously found there was no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election.
Fox News’s biggest names never believed Donald Trump’s election fraud claims but parroted them anyway, newly released court filings show. This story has raised plenty of eyebrows – except for readers of the Wall Street Journal, a publication that shares ownership with the network and has yet to cover it.
On the new Index of Impunity, the United States’s ranking is not particularly enviable.
Updated
But what of the unidentified objects the US military shot down in the days after it destroyed the Chinese spy balloon? There’s still no official explanation of what those were, but the Guardian’s Richard Luscombe reports on the convincing evidence that one may have been a hobbyist’s balloon launched from Illinois:
A group of amateur balloon enthusiasts in Illinois might have solved the mystery of one of the unknown flying objects shot down by the US military last week, a saga that had captivated the nation.
The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade says one of its hobby craft went “missing in action” over Alaska on 11 February, the same day a US F-22 jet downed an unidentified airborne entity not far away above Canada’s Yukon territory.
In a blogpost, the group did not link the two events. But the trajectory of the pico balloon before its last recorded electronic check-in at 12.48am that day suggests a connection – as well as a fiery demise at the hands of a sidewinder missile on the 124th day of its journey, three days before it was set to complete its seventh circumnavigation.
If that is what happened, it would mean the US military expended a missile costing $439,000 to fell an innocuous hobby balloon worth about $12.
The Chinese spy balloon has generated plenty of partisan furor in Washington, but there’s more evidence that Beijing has deployed similar craft for surveillance in the past.
The Wall Street Journal reports that during Donald Trump’s administration, a small group of Pentagon officials tracked strange objects that are now thought to have been balloons over US airspace – but their observations never made their way to the White House.
Here’s more from the report:
Now it appears some intelligence officials at the Pentagon were aware of the incidents and harbored concerns that they were related to China, believing Beijing was using them to test radar-jamming systems over sensitive U.S. military sites. The data collected about the Trump-era incidents was limited to a basic assessment and therefore wasn’t shared more broadly within the government at the time.
Pentagon intelligence analysts reached their assessment about the objects in the summer of 2020, the former officials said.
The assessment “never got to be assertive” in concluding that the objects were linked to Chinese surveillance, said one of the officials familiar with the issue.
The Journal’s article notes that Mark Esper, the defense secretary from 2019 to 2020, never heard about these objects, which were smaller and made shorter flights over navy installations in Guam, California and Virginia.
Republicans seized on the Chinese’s balloon’s flyover this month to argue the Biden administration wasn’t taking the threat from Beijing seriously, but the White House countered that three objects went undetected over US airspace while Trump was in office, and one earlier in Biden’s presidency.
US finishes recovering Chinese balloon
American authorities have retrieved all the wreckage of the Chinese spy balloon a US fighter jet shot down off South Carolina’s coast, the Associated Press reports, which sparked a diplomatic incident with Beijing and kicked off a unusual spate of military action against unidentified objects in North American skies.
According to the AP, “Officials said the US believes that Navy, Coast Guard and FBI personnel collected all of the balloon debris off the ocean floor. US Northern Command said in a statement that the recovery operations ended Thursday and that final pieces are on their way to the FBI lab in Virginia for analysis. It said air and maritime restrictions off South Carolina have been lifted.”
The military shot the Chinese balloon down on 4 February when it was over the Atlantic Ocean, after it had traversed the continental United States. Defense officials argued that if the balloon was downed over land – as Republicans had called for – its wreckage could harm people or property below.
In the days that followed, American jets shot down three more objects flying over the United States and Canada. The objects have yet to be retrieved or identified, but on Thursday, Joe Biden said there’s no evidence yet that they were connected with China, or used for surveillance.
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Is the United States really the “home of the free”? As the Guardian’s Patrick Wintour reports, a new ranking tracking abuses of power gives the world’s third most-populous country a surprisingly poor score:
The US scores surprisingly badly in a new ranking system charting abuses of power by nation states, launched by a group co-chaired by former UK foreign secretary David Miliband.
The US comes close to the median of 163 countries ranked in the Index of Impunity, reflecting a poor record on discrimination, inequality and access to democracy. The country’s arms exports and record of violence are an even bigger negative factor.
The US ranks worse on impunity than Hungary and Singapore, one a poster child for democratic backsliding and the other an illiberal democracy.
The UK performs creditably at 147, only 26 rankings away from the most accountable state. Its score is brought down by its protection of offshore tax havens that facilitate tax abuse in other countries.
Former colonies, many affected by the slave trade, fare poorly in the index, suggesting the experience of imperialist subjection has caused a continuing damaging legacy. Nearly all of the top 20 ranked in the index in terms of impunity are former colonies or touched by colonialism.
The findings are likely to stimulate the already fraught questioning of the presumed superiority of the west, an issue that bedevils debate at the UN and has come to dampen some of the expected support for Ukraine since Russia’s invasion.
The five police officers implicated in Tyre Nichols’s death in Memphis pleaded not guilty to murder charges today. As the Guardian’s Sam Levine reports, the fact that their prosecution is happening at all is due to the local district attorney, who broke with prosecutors’ typical practice to swiftly indict the men involved:
Steve Mulroy had been the Shelby county district attorney for just over 100 days when five Memphis police officers beat and killed Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man.
As the case began to get more and more attention, Mulroy, a Democrat, did something surprising. In high-profile police killings, prosecutors and police are slow to release video while they investigate. Criminal charges against the police officers, if they’re filed at all, come much later.
But Mulroy moved quickly to criminally charge the officers, indicting the five involved in Nichols’ death less than three weeks after the murder. He and the city released body-camera and surveillance footage days later. It was a series of decisions, Mulroy believes, that contributed to why protests after the video was released remained peaceful.
Yesterday’s partial release of a special grand jury report into Donald Trump’s election meddling campaign in Georgia answered few of the many questions about one of the biggest legal threats the former president is facing.
But it was enough for Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state who defied Trump’s request to work with him to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory, to claim victory.
“We were vindicated. We’ve been shown that we’ve been factually correct from day one,” Raffensperger said in an interview with Atlanta’s WSB-TV. “We have been saying since day one that Georgia has honest and fair elections.”
The secretary of state, who was last year re-elected despite a challenge from a Trump-backed candidate, pointed to the report’s conclusion that “no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election.”
“We feel that there’s every question that people had that should really put that to rest now,” he said.
Only the report’s introduction, conclusion and a chapter on jurors’ concerns that some witnesses lied were released. The sections in which the panel weighs in on who should face which charges was kept from the public eye. Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis is using the document to determine whether the election meddling effort merits prosecutions – including, potentially, of Trump.
The revelations from the Fox News text messages are generating headlines all over the place … except at the Wall Street Journal, which is also owned by Rupert Murdoch.
CNN was the first to spot it:
Of note: Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has not posted a single story on the explosive legal filing exposing Fox News for what it is. pic.twitter.com/zUhAed6VNJ
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) February 17, 2023
Needless to say, Fox News also does not appear to be covering the story.
Fox News hosts are and were some of the biggest proponents of the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. But the Associated Press reports that newly released text messages show top names at the network never believed their own words:
Hosts at Fox News did not believe the allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election that were being aired on their programmes by supporters of former president Donald Trump, according to court filings in a $1.6bn (£1.34bn) defamation lawsuit against the network.
“Sidney Powell is lying” about having evidence for election fraud, Tucker Carlson wrote in a message on 16 November 2020, according to an excerpt from an exhibit that remains under seal.
The internal communication was included in a redacted summary judgment brief filed on Thursday by attorneys for Dominion Voting Systems.
Carlson also referred to Powell in a text as an “unguided missile” and “dangerous as hell”. Fellow host Laura Ingraham told Carlson that Powell was “a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy”, referring to the former New York mayor and Trump supporter Rudy Giuliani.
Sean Hannity, meanwhile, said in a deposition “that whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second”, according to Dominion’s filing.
A small but bipartisan group of House lawmakers is demanding the Biden administration send Ukraine F-16s or another American fighter jet to help defend against Russia’s invasion, Politico reports.
“The provision of such aircraft is necessary to help Ukraine protect its airspace, particularly in light of renewed Russian offensives and considering the expected increase in large-scale combat operations,” according to a letter sent by a group of five House members – three Democrats and two Republicans.
“F-16s or similar fourth generation fighter aircraft would provide Ukraine with a highly mobile platform from which to target Russian air-to-air missiles and drones, to protect Ukrainian ground forces as they engage Russian troops, as well as to engage Russian fighters for contested air superiority.”
Politico reports that Jared Golden organized the letter, which was signed by Jason Crow and Chrissy Houlahan, all Democrats. Republicans Mike Gallagher and Tony Gonzales also signed on.
Ukraine has asked for F-16s since the war started last year, but Washington has yet to agree to the demand.
Meanwhile in Congress, top Democratic and Republican leaders remain supportive of Ukraine, but the Guardian’s Julian Borger reports an ascendant faction of right-wing lawmakers could threaten Washington’s aid flows:
Vladimir Putin has proven adept at exploiting the US political divide, so the solid bipartisan consensus behind arming Ukraine over the past year may well have come as a surprise to him. The question one year into the war is: how long can that consensus last?
Two weeks before the first anniversary of the full-scale invasion on 24 February, a group of Trump-supporting Republicans led by Matt Gaetz introduced a “Ukraine fatigue” resolution that, if passed, would “express through the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States must end its military and financial aid to Ukraine, and urges all combatants to reach a peace agreement”.
The resolution is sponsored by 11 Republican members of Congress on the far right Freedom Caucus faction, and is highly unlikely to pass. But it marks a shot across the bows of the leadership, which has mostly vowed to stay the course in supporting Ukraine.
Justifying the resolution, Gaetz pointed to the risks of escalation of the Ukraine war into a wider global conflict and to the economic cost to the US.
“President Joe Biden must have forgotten his prediction from March 2022, suggesting that arming Ukraine with military equipment will escalate the conflict to ‘World War III’,” the Florida Republican said. “America is in a state of managed decline, and it will exacerbate if we continue to haemorrhage taxpayer dollars toward a foreign war.”
Ron DeSantis has recently gained a reputation as the GOP’s best hope to keep Donald Trump from the top of the ticket in 2024.
The governor reinvigorated the culture wars in Florida, including by taking on Disney World, cracking down on shaky claims of election fraud and going after the state’s higher education institutions for being too “woke”.
But that doesn’t mean Republicans won’t have other candidates to choose from. Trump’s former UN ambassador Nikki Haley formally launched her presidential campaign this week, and his ex-vice-president Mike Pence is waiting in the wings, along with a host of others. That all could be good news for the former president; a recent poll showed it would be DeSantis’s support – not Trump’s – that would suffer in a contested primary.
Sarah Palin, the one-time candidate for vice-president whose hokey, vapid brand of conservatism is seen as a prototype for Trump’s iconic style, thinks DeSantis should hold off. “He should stay governor for a bit longer. He’s young, you know. He has decades ahead of him where he can be our president,” she said this week. That’s the opposite of the advice she gave herself in 2009, when she resigned as Alaska’s governor before completing her term.
DeSantis set to talk to police union as 2024 run speculation mounts
Good morning, US politics blog readers. Donald Trump is running for president, and so is Nikki Haley, but what about Ron DeSantis? The Florida governor has been seen as a potential replacement for Trump at the top of the Republican ticket ever since the former president left the White House. DeSantis is keeping mum about his plans, but Politico reports he’s heading next week to speak to a police union in Chicago. It’s not as big a tell as a visit to Iowa, but the address will nonetheless offer a platform for DeSantis to detail how he’d take his approach to law enforcement – including, perhaps, an armed election fraud taskforce that’s made high-profile arrests at gunpoint but had mixed success in court – national.
Here’s a look at what’s going on today:
Kamala Harris is at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, where she’ll meet with German chancellor Olaf Scholz and British prime minister Rishi Sunak. A big congressional delegation is also in attendance, including the Senate’s Democratic and Republican leaders, Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will answer reporters’ questions at 1:30pm ET.
