Closing summary
Democrats are planning an offensive against the GOP over access to contraception, and have seized on a vote by Louisiana’s Republican state lawmakers to tighten access to abortion medication and argue that Donald Trump, the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, will undermine reproductive rights, if elected. The party is also mulling a response to last week’s report that conservative supreme court justice Samuel Alito once flew a flag associated with Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, though top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell defended the court. The nine justices are still considering cases concerning Trump’s immunity on charges related to meddling in the 2020 election, and on abortion access. The court announces more decisions tomorrow, and those issues could be among them.
Here’s what else happened today:
Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, reiterated that the United States supports a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis after three European allies unilaterally recognized a Palestinian state.
A Guardian poll conducted by Harris found a majority of voters think the economy is in worse shape than it actually is, and are blaming Joe Biden.
Rudy Giuliani reportedly agreed to stop attacking two Georgia election workers who last year won a major defamation judgment against him.
Republican House speaker Mike Johnson wants to “punish” the international criminal court for its chief prosecutor’s request for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders.
Hunter Biden’s laptop will soon get its day in court.
Updated
Republican House speaker Mike Johnson wants to invite Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make a joint address to Congress, but is waiting to hear from the Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer before sending the invitation, ABC News reports.
If he does not hear from Schumer, Johnson said: “We were going to proceed and invite Netanyahu just to the House.”
Schumer is publicly open to the idea, saying: “I’m discussing that now with the speaker of the House, and as I’ve always said, our relationship with Israel is ironclad and transcends any one prime minister or president.”
Netanyahu last addressed Congress in 2015. A meeting between Schumer and Netanyahu could be a little awkward, since the Senate leader recently called him “an obstacle to peace” in Gaza and said Israel should hold new elections:
Updated
Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop will get its day in court, literally.
CNN reports that David Weiss, the special counsel who is pursuing charges against the president’s son related to his allegedly lying about his drug use when buying a firearm, will introduce the laptop’s contents in court when the trial begins on 3 June.
“The defendant’s laptop is real (it will be introduced as a trial exhibit) and it contains significant evidence of the defendant’s guilt,” prosecutors wrote today in a filing, according to CNN.
Here’s more:
Weiss plans to use the laptop to back up his narrow claim that Biden was addicted to illegal drugs when he bought a gun in 2018, allegedly in violation of federal law. Weiss has not addressed the unproven allegation from Republicans that emails on the laptop prove that Biden and his father were involved in corrupt foreign deals.
Biden has pleaded not guilty to three gun crimes. The trial is set to begin June 3 at the federal court in Delaware.
In their own court filings earlier this week, Hunter Biden’s lawyers said they want to contest the authenticity of the materials from the laptop if Weiss brings it up at trial.
‘Defense counsel has numerous reasons to believe the data had been altered and compromised before investigators obtained the electronic material,’ his lawyers wrote.
Biden dropped off the laptop at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019. His lawyers said in the filing that the shop owner admitted in his memoir that he ‘began accessing sensitive, private material in the data’ right away, and continued to potentially tamper with the data throughout the five months before the FBI seized the device.
Prosecutors counter by saying that some of the people who exchanged these messages with Biden will testify and assert that the messages are real. They also say the laptop materials are only a fraction of the digital evidence they have collected against Biden, including messages subpoenaed directly from Apple.
‘He has not shown any of the actual evidence in this case is unreliable or inauthentic, because there is none,’ Weiss’ team wrote in a Wednesday filing. ‘Instead, the defendant’s theory about the laptop is a conspiracy theory with no supporting evidence.’
While Biden has written publicly of his struggles with addiction, his defense attorney recently accused federal prosecutors of not getting their evidence quite right:
Updated
While some of its allies are moving to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state, Washington DC is worried that Benajmin Netanyahu may undermine a deal to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the Guardian’s Bethan McKernan reports:
The US is worried that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, may be willing to torpedo a potential normalisation deal with Saudi Arabia if it entails ending the war in Gaza and committing to working towards a two-state solution to the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, told the Senate’s foreign relations committee on Tuesday: “We have sought to move forward in negotiating the bilateral aspects, but even if we were to conclude those agreements – and I believe we could, relatively quickly – it could not go forward absent other things that need to happen for normalisation to proceed.
“There’s an opportunity for Israel to become integrated in the region, to get the fundamental security it needs and wants, to have the relationships it’s wanted since its founding. The Saudis have been clear that this would require calm in Gaza and a credible pathway to a Palestinian state,” he said, adding: “It may well be at this moment, Israel is not able or willing to proceed down this pathway.”
The Biden administration has been working for some time on a plan in which Riyadh would normalise relations with Israel in return for a formal defence pact with the US and assistance in developing a civilian nuclear programme.
While the international criminal court has attracted opprobrium from both sides of the aisle for chief prosecutor Karim Khan’s request for arrest warrants against top Israeli officials, it does have some defenders in Washington.
Independent senator Bernie Sanders delivered an address on the Senate floor yesterday arguing that Khan’s investigation was in the interest of justice, and argued that the United States cannot object to the conduct of authoritarian rivals such as Russia and China if it does not hold Israel – a top ally – to the same standard:
What the ICC is doing is important for the world. It’s [a message] to leaders all over the world – dictators, people in democratic countries – that if you go to war you cannot wage all-out war against civilians. That’s what the ICC is doing, that’s important. But it is also important, Mr. President, for those of us in the United States. Our nation claims to be the leader of the free world, and at our best we try to mobilize countries to uphold international law and prevent crimes against humanity. That is what we try to do and have done.
You can see Sanders’s full speech here:
LIVE: Even democratically-elected officials can commit war crimes. We cannot apply international law only when it’s convenient. https://t.co/0arq3ensqH
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) May 21, 2024
Updated
Israeli leaders updated the White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, on its intentions to minimize civilian harm in the southern Gaza city of Rafah when he visited the region last weekend, he said at the White House media briefing a little earlier.
We now have to see what unfolds from here. What we’re going to be looking at is whether there is a lot of death and destruction from this operation or if it is more precise and proportional,” he said, Reuters reports.
Sullivan said Israeli operations to date in the area have been targeted and limited. He also said aid is flowing from a pier in Gaza to the Palestinians there, and that it was wrong for Israel to withhold funds from the Palestinian authority in the West Bank.
Updated
Joe Biden plans to visit Africa as president, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said.
The president would look forward to visiting Africa. He intends to do so as president of the United States,” Sullivan told reporters at the White House briefing, Reuters reports.
Sullivan said he had no formal announcement to make of a Africa visit by Biden.
Adding from the Guardian: there has been chat about Biden “breaking his promise”, made early in his administration, to visit the continent while president, with assumptions that there would be no time for such a visit prior to the presidential election in November and, obviously, no guarantee that he will win a second term in the White House.
The Associated Press continues, with reporting that Biden is welcoming the president of Kenya, William Ruto, to the White House later today to kick off a three-day state visit.
Ruto comes to Washington as his country is preparing to deploy 1,000 police officers to Haiti to take part in a United Nations-led security effort in the Caribbean nation.
The White House press briefing has just ended.
National security advisor Jake Sullivan just said he was surprised by the announcement of UK prime minister Rishi Sunak that Britain will hold its general election on July 4.
There were no jokes about loss of empire or anything like that, the annual Fourth of July holiday marking independence day, where the US celebrates declaring independence from Great Britain in 1776 after the American revolution, throwing off British rule.
“I was surprised to see it today,” Sullivan said, adding: “But I do not have any real comment on it. We have a very strong, maybe that’s an understatement, alliance with the UK, regardless of elections and prime ministers. We wish them well.”
Sullivan said it would not affect the 50th G7 summit, due to be held in Italy June 13 to 15, which Sunak is expected to attend.
Sullivan said the summit would be about strategy, not politics.
US prefers two-state talks to unilateral declarations of Palestinian state - White House
The US is sticking to its policy of favoring talks leading to a two-state solution in the Middle East that guarantees the status of Israel and “security for the Palestinian people” – not declaring recognition for Palestine as three European countries did earlier today.
At the White House press briefing that’s underway, with press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and national security advisor Jake Sullivan, in Washington, Sullivan was asked about Ireland, Spain and Norway announcing they will formally recognize a Palestinian state on 28 May.
“We believe in a two-state solution that should be brought about by direct talks between parties, not unilateral declarations,” Sullivan said.
He added moments later: “We believe the only way we are going to achieve a two-state solution is through direct negotiations.”
Sullivan did not say the word Palestine at any point.
He also said, when asked about Israel’s growing diplomatic isolation in relation to its military offensive in Gaza, that “we certainly have seen a growing chorus of voices that had previously been in support of Israel drifting in another direction. That concerns us.”
Sullivan added that it only boosted the US desire to see greater “regional integration”, with a two state solution for Israelis and Palestinians and Israel “being integrated with the modern Arab states,” which he had been discussing most recently with Saudi Arabia.
Updated
The day so far
Democrats are planning an offensive against the GOP over access to contraception, and have seized on a vote by Louisiana’s Republican state lawmakers to tighten access to abortion medication and argue that Donald Trump, the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, will undermine reproductive rights, if elected. The party is also mulling a response to last week’s report that conservative supreme court justice Samuel Alito once flew a flag associated with Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, though top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell defended the court. The nine justices are still considering cases concerning Trump’s immunity on charges related to meddling in the 2020 election, and on abortion access. The court announces more decisions tomorrow, and those issues could be among them.
Here’s what else is going on today:
A Guardian poll conducted by Harris found a majority of voters think the economy is in worse shape than it actually is, and are blaming Joe Biden.
Rudy Giuliani reportedly agreed to stop attacking two Georgia election workers who last year won a major defamation judgment against him.
Republican House speaker Mike Johnson wants to “punish” the international criminal court for its chief prosecutor’s request for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders.
Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, says the United States should “punish” the international criminal court and its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, who earlier this week requested arrest warrants for top Israeli and Hamas leaders:
Neither the US nor Israel are parties to the Rome Statute that governs the court, and Joe Biden has objected to Khan’s applications for warrants against Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, the humanitarian situation is on the verge of collapse despite the installation of a US-funded floating pier on its shoreline:
Updated
Economic concerns loom large in the minds of voters nationwide, including in Georgia, a state Joe Biden won in 2020, the first Democrat to do so in decades, But polls have shown the president’s support slipping in the state, and as the Guardian’s Michael Sainato reports from rural Peach county, concerns over the availability of jobs and the affordability of essentials are one reason why:
Rows of pecan and peach trees frame the scenery throughout Peach county, Georgia, a rural area of central Georgia, about 100 miles south of Atlanta. A field of yellow school buses pack a lot on the way into Fort Valley, the county’s seat, where the buses used across the US are manufactured.
Peach county is a swing county in what has emerged as one of the most important swing states in the presidential election. And, according to a March 2024 poll conducted by Emerson College, the economy is the most important issue to Georgia voters. About 32% of those polled said the economy was their top priority, trailed by immigration at 14% and healthcare at 12%.
In 2020, Joe Biden won the state of Georgia by 0.2 percentage points. Donald Trump won Peach county by just over 500 votes, 51.8% to 47.2%. Emerson’s last poll found 46% of voters in Georgia currently support Trump to 42% supporting Biden, with 12% undecided – setting the state, and Peach county, on course for another nail-biting election where views on the economy will be key.
For Victoria Simmons, a retired local newspaper editor who lives in Byron, the economy is a top issue. “People can hardly afford to buy groceries and are losing hope,” she said. “We need to be focusing more on our own country rather than sending millions to places like Ukraine.
“If the election is fair and there is no tampering, I believe we will see a Trump victory,” she said.
Guardian poll draws worrying conclusion for Democrats about voters' perception of the economy
Democrats are having increasing trouble convincing voters that the US economy is in a healthy state, a new Harris poll conducted for the Guardian found.
Despite months of strong job growth, declines in the rate of inflation and record highs in stock indices, the survey indicated that a majority of Americans wrongly believe the country is in a recession. More worryingly for Joe Biden’s re-election prospects, nearly 60% blame “mismanagement” from his administration for making the situation worse. Those findings line up with other polls that have shown voters giving the president poor marks for his handling of the economy.
The Guardian’s Lauren Aratani has a full breakdown of the survey’s findings:
Democrats go on the offensive against Trump, GOP, over contraception access
Democrats are looking for an edge against Donald Trump, and are moving forward with plans to tie the ex-president and his Republican allies to efforts to cut off access to contraception.
Joe Biden’s campaign has seized on a vote by Louisiana’s Republican state lawmakers to reclassify two abortion drugs in a way that would make possessing them without a prescription a crime, calling it is a sign of policies to come if Trump is returned to the White House.
“What’s happening right here in Louisiana is just one example of this dystopian agenda Trump and his allies are pushing,” Mitch Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor who is a co-chair of Biden’s campaign, said in a call with reporters. “It’s a far cry from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who are standing up for women’s fundamental freedoms and leading a whole-of-government effort to protect and strengthen access to reproductive health care in the face of extreme Republican attacks. They are going to fight like hell to restore protections of Roe v Wade, and they will never allow a national abortion ban to become law.”
In the US Senate, Democratic majority leader Chuck Schumer announced the chamber would on Thursday vote on the Right to Contraception Act, which is intended to protect access to the medication.
“Now more than ever, contraception is a critical piece of protecting women’s reproductive freedoms, standing as nothing short of a vital lifeline for millions of American women across the country,” Schumer said today in announcing the push. Senate legislation needs 60 votes to pass, and it is unclear if the measure will attract the Republican support necessary to clear that bar.
Democrats have benefited from public concern over reproductive rights generated by the supreme court’s 2022 ruling overturning Roe v Wade and allowing states to ban abortion. They are banking on that support emerging again in the November presidential election, though, as the Guardian’s Carter Sherman reports, not all abortion rights supporters are comfortable with that strategy:
Updated
Mike Johnson has his own problems, particularly when it comes to maintaining staff, the Guardian’s Robert Tait reports:
The Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, is reeling from a sudden staff exodus as he struggles to keep his position and the GOP’s tiny majority in the run-up to November’s elections.
In the latest in a spate of resignations, Johnson’s well-connected communications director, Raj Shah, a former White House deputy press secretary under Donald Trump, has confirmed he is leaving, Axios reported. He is expected to depart by the end of the summer.
News of his impending departure comes a day after it was announced that three top policy staff members, Brittan Specht, Jason Yaworske and Preston Hill, had quit and would leave by the end of May.
All three worked for the previous speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who was ousted in an internal party coup last October, but were retained by Johnson when he ascended to the speaker’s chair.
Next week, jurors in New York City will begin deliberating over whether Donald Trump is guilty of charges related to falsifying business documents to conceal hush money payments ahead of the 2016 election.
Earlier today Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, was asked for his thoughts on the allegation that Trump was trying to cover up extra-martial affairs. Johnson is a longtime ally of the former president, and indicated nothing he had heard from the trial had shaken his faith:
CNN's @mkraju: "You've been very clear about your disdain for the hush money case, but what about the underlying alleged conduct of paying off a porn star to keep this extramarital affair allegedly quiet?"
— The Recount (@therecount) May 22, 2024
Speaker Mike Johnson: "I'm not gonna comment on that." pic.twitter.com/G9BPWLwxhU
Trump’s defense attorneys concluded their arguments yesterday, without calling him as a witness to testify. Closing arguments are scheduled for next Tuesday and the jury is expected to begin deliberating the following day. Here’s a look back at the trial’s conclusion:
Updated
Republicans are standing behind Samuel Alito after the New York Times reported that a flag associated with Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election flew outside his home shortly before Joe Biden took office.
The Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who together with Trump was instrumental in creating the six-justice conservative supermajority on the court, was asked about the Times’s story yesterday. Here’s what he had to say:
CNN's @mkraju: "Should [Justice Alito] recuse himself in any cases related to the election?"
— The Recount (@therecount) May 21, 2024
Mitch McConnell: "It seems to me they're just nonstop attacks on the Supreme Court, week after week ... We need to leave the Supreme Court alone." pic.twitter.com/ZSokCjYWFo
A handful of states held primaries last night, including Georgia, where Democrats in the Atlanta-area Fulton county made Fani Willis their nominee for district attorney once again. You may remember her as the prosecutor who brought charges against Trump and 18 others for trying to overturn the state’s 2020 election. Here’s more about her primary win, from the Associated Press:
Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney overseeing Georgia’s expansive criminal case against Donald Trump and his allies for attempting to overturn the 2020 election, has won her Democratic primary bid for re-election with nearly 90% of the vote.
Willis and Judge Scott McAfee – who won his primary election on Tuesday – are central figures in the prosecution against the former president and associates in his orbit accused of conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Willis will now face the Republican lawyer Courtney Kramer in November. With her high name recognition, the advantages of incumbency and a hefty fundraising haul, Willis’s victory in the primary was not terribly surprising.
Giuliani agrees to stop fraud accusations against Georgia election workers - report
Rudy Giuliani has agreed to stop accusing two Georgia election workers of fraud, according to a court filing seen by NBC News.
Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss won a more than $148m judgment against Giuliani last year after a jury found he defamed them with untrue statements about their conduct during the 2020 election. Giuliani filed for bankruptcy following the judgment, and NBC News reports he has agreed to no longer attack them, and to comply with the judgment.
Here’s more about the very expensive case for the former New York City mayor:
Steve Cohen, a Democratic congressman, has introduced a resolution to censure Samuel Alito over the flag flown outside his house that was associated with Donald Trump’s baseless election fraud claims.
The conservative supreme court justice has said the banner was raised after his wife got into a dispute with their neighbor. Cohen’s resolution demands Alito recuse himself from considering cases dealing with the January 6 insurrection or 2020 election.
It also censures him “for knowingly violating the federal recusal statute and binding ethics standards and calling the impartiality of the supreme court of the United States into question by continuing to participate in cases in which his prior public conduct could be reasonably interpreted to demonstrate bias”.
In a statement, Cohen, of Tennessee, accused Alito of showing support for those who attacked the Capitol:
Beyond poor judgment, Justice Alito’s misuse of the American flag is a knowing and shameless demonstration of his political bias. He literally flew a flag in front of his house showing the world he supported the January 6th insurrectionists. What’s more, he continues to participate in litigation directly related to the 2020 election and the insurrection, in direct violation of the federal recusal statute and the supreme court’s own ethics rules.
Republicans control the House, and it is unlikely they will allow Cohen’s resolution to pass.
Updated
Donald Trump’s legal troubles have made their way into a variety of courtrooms, including Aileen Cannon’s chambers in Florida. She is the Trump-appointed federal judge handling his case on charges related to possessing classified documents, and recently postponed his trial indefinitely. Today, she is hearing arguments over whether to dismiss his case, the Associated Press reports:
Prosecutors and defense lawyers in the classified documents case against the former president are due in court on Wednesday for the first time since the judge indefinitely postponed the trial earlier this month.
The case, one of four criminal prosecutions against Trump, had been set for trial on 20 May but US district judge Aileen Cannon cited numerous issues she had yet to resolve as a basis for canceling the trial date.
On Wednesday, Cannon was scheduled to hear arguments on a Trump request to dismiss the indictment on grounds that it fails to clearly articulate a crime and instead amounts to “a personal and political attack against President Trump” with a “litany of uncharged grievances both for public and media consumption”.
Prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith’s team, which brought the case, will argue against that request. Trump is not expected to be present for the hearing.
The motion is one of several that Trump’s lawyers have filed to dismiss the case, some of which have already been denied.
Updated
Supreme court to issue more decisions on Thursday with abortion and Trump immunity cases pending
The supreme court is set to issue its latest decisions on Thursday, potentially on some of the hot-button topic pending before the conservative-dominated body.
While there’s no telling in advance which cases the nine justices may rule on, two suits dealing with abortion and one directly with Donald Trump have yet to be resolved.
We will start with the one concerning the former president. He has asked the justices to rule that he is immune from federal prosecution for attempting to overturn the 2020 election, and in oral arguments, several conservative justices sounded partial to that argument. If they indeed reach that conclusion, it could further delay a trial that may prove pivotal to his chances of winning the 2024 election. Here’s more on that:
The other two cases deal with abortion, an issue that polls have shown is a top concern for voters, and one in which Democrats have had an edge ever since the supreme court’s conservatives overturned Roe v Wade two years ago, and allowed states to ban abortion.
Anti-abortion doctors have asked the justices to roll back the availability of abortion pill mifepristone but, in their oral arguments, the justices sounded skeptical:
The outcome was less apparent in a clash between the Biden administration and Idaho over whether federally funded hospitals could be required to perform abortions in emergencies, even in states that ban the procedure:
Updated
House Democrat proposes censuring supreme court justice Alito after reports of flag connected to Trump election lies
Good morning, US politics blog readers. It has been nearly a week since the New York Times broke the news that a flag associated with Donald Trump’s baseless fraud claims about the 2020 election flew outside the house of the conservative supreme court justice Samuel Alito, and Democrats appear to be gearing up to respond. Congressman Steve Cohen has proposed censuring Alito, while yesterday Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s Democratic leader, said flying the flag “casts some doubt on [his] impartiality”, and added he would be looking for ways to respond. Last year, Democrats convened the Senate judiciary committee to try to build support for legislation requiring the court to impose an enforceable code of ethics following earlier reports of ties between conservative justices and wealthy parties with interests before the court. But that legislation went nowhere in the face of Republican opposition, and there is no sign of that calculus changing today. Meanwhile, the conservative-dominated court is considering cases whose outcomes could weigh on the November presidential election, including Trump’s bid for immunity from charges related to his attempt to stop Joe Biden from taking office. We’ll let you know if Democrats elaborate on their next steps today.
Here’s what else is going on:
Most Americans wrongly believe the country is in a recession, and put the blame on Biden, a new Harris poll conducted for the Guardian finds.
Aileen Cannon, the judge in Trump’s classified documents case who recently delayed his trial indefinitely, will hold a hearing on motions from his lawyers to dismiss the charges.
Biden welcomes Kenya’s president William Ruto to the White House at 4pm, where they will meet with CEOs and business leaders.
