Closing summary
That’s all from our live politics blog for today. Thanks for joining us.
Here’s what we followed:
Joe Biden’s foreign policy objectives were laid out in his administration’s long awaited national security strategy, a 48-page document released by the White House this morning. Outcompeting China, curbing Russian aggression, and building an international alliance to do both are the main goals.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan said the US was better placed than any other nation to seize what he called a “decisive decade” that will determine the fate of the free world. “The actions we take now will shape whether this decisive decade is an age of conflict and discord are the beginning of a more prosperous and stable future,” he said.
Biden dedicated the Camp Hale continental divide national monument during a visit to Vail, Colorado. The proclamation preserves the lands to “honor our nation’s veterans, Indigenous people, and their legacy,” the president said.
Biden made clear he’s willing to retaliate against Saudi Arabia for backing the Opec+ oil production cut, but hasn’t yet said what measures he supports. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre spoke of unspecified “consequences” for the Saudis, but not for some time.
Mitt Romney is staying out of the Senate race in Utah, declining to endorse his Republican Senate counterpart Mike Lee, or independent challenger Evan McMullin, both of whom he considers friends.
Tulsi Gabbard, who yesterday announced she was leaving the Democratic party, is heading to New Hampshire to campaign for rightwing Republican Senate candidate Don Bolduc.
Political polling by telephone has become so difficult it may soon become impossible, The New York Times warns.
Alex Jones to pay $965m for Sandy Hook lies
Rightwing InfoWars host Alex Jones must pay $965m to families of victims and those he hurt by calling the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting a hoax, a jury has decided.
The decision concludes his second defamation trial, in Waterbury, Connecticut, less than 20 miles from Newtown, where a man shot 26 children and teachers dead in 2012.
WATERBURY, Conn. (AP) — Jury says Alex Jones should pay $965 million to people who suffered from his lies about the Sandy Hook school massacre.
— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) October 12, 2022
Updated
Donald Trump will have to answer questions under oath next week in a defamation lawsuit lodged by a writer who says he raped her in the mid-1990s, a judge ruled Wednesday.
US district judge Lewis Kaplan rejected a request by Trump’s lawyers that the planned testimony be delayed. The deposition is now scheduled for 19 October.
The decision came in a lawsuit brought by E Jean Carroll, a longtime advice columnist for Elle magazine, who says Trump raped her in an upscale Manhattan department store’s dressing room. Trump has denied it. Carroll is scheduled to be deposed on Friday.
Read more:
A quick summary of Karine Jean-Pierre’s answer when she was asked this afternoon about Joe Biden’s earlier “we will take action” comment about Saudi Arabia, for pushing Opec+ to slash oil production: there will be consequences, but not for some time.
The White House press secretary was asked during a “gaggle” with reporters on Air Force One what the president mean by “action”, a remark he did not expand on as he departed Washington DC en route to Colorado:
As he said this morning, when the House and the Senate get back we’ll discuss and make decisions in a deliberate way. But he was very clear there will be consequences. We believe the decision that Opec+ made last week was a mistake.
We’re going to review where we are. We’ll be watching closely over the coming weeks and months. There’s going to be consultation with our allies, there’s going to be consultation with Congress, and decisions will be made in a deliberate way.
We want to be very deliberate about this. And that is going to take some time. I don’t have a timeline for you.
Sullivan: Global democracy facing 'decisive decade'
The US is better placed than any other nation to seize what White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan says is a “decisive decade” that will determine the fate of the free world.
Sullivan is speaking at Georgetown university, where he’s putting flesh on the bones of the Biden administration’s national security strategy, released earlier today.
Tune in now: A Conversation with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. https://t.co/kNmLfMVPn2
— Georgetown SFS (@georgetownsfs) October 12, 2022
Outcompeting China, curbing Russian aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere, and building a global coalition to tackle those issues, are Biden’s key policy objectives for the year, Sullivan says:
The post-cold war era is over and the competition is under way between the major powers to shape what comes next. The US, we believe, is better positioned than any other nation in the world to seize this moment to help set the rules shore up the norms and advance the values that will define the world we want to live in.
[The strategy] details the president’s vision of a free, open, prosperous and secure international order. And it offers a roadmap for seizing this decisive decade to advance America’s vital interests, position America and our allies to outpace our competitors, and build broad effective coalition’s to tackle shared challenges.
The matters laid out in this document and the execution of it do not only belong to the US government, they belong to everyone who shares this vision worldwide.
And the stakes could not be higher. The actions we take now will shape whether this decisive decade is an age of conflict and discord are the beginning of a more prosperous and stable future.
Sullivan is being careful to stress Biden’s foreign policy strategy as a partnership:
If there’s anything that is a core hallmark of Joe Biden’s approach to the world, it is an investment in America’s allies.
Even if our democratic allies and partners don’t agree on everything, they are aligned with us, and so are many countries that do not embrace democratic institutions, but nevertheless depend upon and help sustain a rules-based international system.
They don’t want to see it vanish and they know that we are the world’s best bet to defend it.
That’s why the second strategic focus of President Biden’s approach is mobilizing the broadest possible coalition of nations to leverage our collective influence. Our goal is not to force our partners to fall in line with us on every issue.
The White House has released a fact sheet about Joe Biden’s unveiling of the Camp Hale continental divide national monument in Vail, Colorado, a little later this afternoon.
The proclamation of the monument “will honor our nation’s veterans, Indigenous people, and their legacy by protecting this Colorado landscape, while supporting jobs and America’s outdoor recreation economy,” the press release says.
I'm headed to Camp Hale, Colorado.
— President Biden (@POTUS) October 12, 2022
Because today, I'm declaring the Camp Hale-Continental Divide area a national monument in honor of our nation’s veterans, Indigenous people, and their legacy.
The monument “preserves and protects the mountains and valleys where the US Army’s 10th Mountain Division prepared for their brave service that ultimately brought [the second world war] to a close”.
The division’s actions in the Italian Alps using skills acquired in training in Camp Hale’s rugged mountains included a daring nighttime mission scaling a 1,500ft cliff, and ultimately pushing back elite Axis forces.
Today, President Biden is traveling to Colorado to establish the Camp Hale – Continental Divide National Monument.
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) October 12, 2022
This action will honor our nation’s veterans and Indigenous people, support jobs, and protect an iconic outdoor space. https://t.co/DmR5yDr1QG
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has been expanding on Joe Biden’s assessment of Vladimir Putin as a “rational actor who has miscalculated significantly” Russia’s prospects of occupying Ukraine.
Jean-Pierre was speaking to reporters aboard a bumpy flight on Air Force One to Colorado, explaining why it was it was an error on the Russian president’s part:
If you look at how strong the Nato alliance is, he thought he would break that up, and it was a miscalculation because what he has seen as a stronger Nato, what he is seeing as a strong west, and what he’s seeing is a coalition that we have never seen before as far as the strength of the countries coming together to support Ukraine.
He miscalculated what his aggression, what his war that he created against Ukraine, would lead to and and we’ve seen that he has become a pariah.
But she would not be drawn on specifically why Biden thought Putin was “rational”:
I’m going to let the president’s words speak for themselves. He is a rational actor who has miscalculated.
Read more:
National security strategy targets China's influence, Russia's aggression
The Biden administration’s long awaited national security strategy says outcompeting China, and restraining Russia’s aggression as its war in Ukraine war progresses, will be its key goals for the coming year.
The 48-page document, launched Wednesday after a number of delays as the White House adjusted to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine, talks up the president’s resolve to build international alliances to stand up for democracy.
At a press briefing accompanying its release, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the war hadn’t “fundamentally altered” Joe Biden’s approach to foreign policy, but has strengthened the importance of, and his desire to work with international partners:
Sullivan said:
[The strategy] presents in living color the key elements of our approach, the emphasis on allies, the importance of strengthening the hand of the democratic world and standing up for our fellow democracies and for democratic values.
What the nuclear threats and saber rattling we’ve seen from Russia remind us of is just what a significant and seriously dangerous adversary Russia is, not just to the US but to a world that is seeking peace and stability, and now has seen that flagrantly disrupted by this invasion and now by all of the saber rattling.
Being able to watch how Ukraine unfolded, have the terms of geopolitical competition sharpened up over the course of the past few months, and also being able to put on display how our strategy works in practice – I think all of those serve a good purpose in terms of giving life to the document that we’re releasing today.
Regarding China, the strategy highlights Biden’s concerns that Beijing was attempting to “layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy”.
In his preview of the policy Wednesday, Sullivan added:
The People’s Republic of China harbors the intention and, increasingly, the capacity to reshape the international order in favor of one that tilts the global playing field to its benefit, even as the US remains committed to managing the competition between our countries responsibly.
[The Biden administration] is looking at ways that the US can more effectively approach our trade policy with China to ensure that we are achieving the strategic priorities the president has laid out, which is the strongest possible American industrial and innovation base and a level playing field for American workers.
Sullivan is scheduled to deliver further remarks this afternoon at an event hosted by the Center for a New American Security and the Georgetown University Walsh school of foreign service.
Updated
We’ll hear from Joe Biden in Vail, Colorado, later this afternoon as he talks up America’s outdoor spaces on the first leg of a three-state tour of the west.
But the main purpose of his odyssey is to promote his administration’s accomplishments and rally for Democratic candidates in the upcoming midterms, now less than four weeks away.
Biden’s first stop is to designate his administration’s first national monument at the behest of Democratic Colorado senator Michael Bennet, the Associated Press reports. Bennet is in a competitive reelection race.
The president later today heads for California, where he will hold two events promoting legislative successes including the bipartisan Infrastructure and Chips acts, and headline a fundraiser for the House Democrats’ campaign arm.
In Los Angeles, he’ll get a close-up look at the racism scandal engulfing the city commission. On Tuesday, the president called for the resignation of three Los Angeles city council members who were caught on tape making racist comments in a meeting last year.
Then he will appear on Monday in Oregon, where Democrats’ grip on the governor’s mansion in Salem is under threat. The party is also fighting several close congressional races in the state.
“We’ve been very clear that the president is going to go out, the vice president is going to go out,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in her Tuesday briefing from the White House.
Talking of Jean-Pierre, she is set to deliver a briefing to reporters soon aboard Air Force One en route to Colorado.
The day so far
When the panel investigating the January 6 attack convenes tomorrow for what’s likely to be its final public hearing, expect to learn more about what Donald Trump knew both ahead of the insurrection, and while it was happening. Meanwhile, president Joe Biden has made clear he’s willing to retaliate against Saudi Arabia for backing the Opec+ oil production cut, but hasn’t yet said what measures he supports.
Here’s what else has happened today:
Mitt Romney is staying out of the Senate race in Utah, declining to endorse his Republican Senate counterpart Mike Lee, or independent challenger Evan McMullin, both of whom he considers friends.
Tulsi Gabbard, who yesterday announced she was leaving the Democratic party, is heading to New Hampshire to campaign for rightwing Republican Senate candidate Don Bolduc.
Political polling by telephone has become so difficult it may soon become impossible, The New York Times warns.
An inescapable reality of the upcoming elections is that many Americans will be heading to the polls wondering how they will afford their next meal. From Ohio, Matt Krupnick looks deeper at the causes and consequences of America’s hunger crisis:
The cars started lining up at least an hour before the late shift at the Mid-Ohio Food Collective, a converted mattress factory just south of Columbus. Drivers pulled into a white tent where volunteers rolled grocery carts full of produce, meat, cake, detergent and other items toward each vehicle, efficiently loading trunks.
One volunteer, 31-year-old Danyel Barwick, directed traffic with a big orange flag. It wasn’t long ago that Barwick, a Columbus mother of four, was on the other side of the food bank equation.
“It was humiliating,” said Barwick, who lost her job during the pandemic in 2020 and, realizing she had no protein in the house and had used all her fast-food coupons, decided to visit a food pantry at a local church. “I was embarrassed and sad.”
As US voters prepare to decide control of both houses of Congress in November, millions will head to the polls while struggling to feed themselves and their families. In 2021, according to the US Department of Agriculture, more than 13m households had trouble affording enough food. And there are signs, from census data, that food hardship could be getting worse this year.
You know who’s not on the campaign trail? Mitt Romney, and that’s significant.
The Republican senator from Utah has declined to make an endorsement in the race between Mike Lee, the state’s sitting GOP senator, and independent Evan McMullin. While Utah is deeply red, Lee is apparently worried about his polling lead over McMullin. Politico reports that Lee appeared on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and pled for Romney to endorse him.
“Mitt, if you’d like to protect the Republican majority, give us any chance of seizing the Republican majority once again — getting it away from the Democrats who are facilitating this massive spending spree and a massive inflationary binge — please, get on board. Help me win reelection. Help us do that,” Lee said, according to Politico.
Romney considers both Lee and McMullin to be “good friends,” according to Politico, and has not made an endorsement in the race for that reason. It’s also worth keeping in mind that Romney is one of Donald Trump’s most enduring foes in the Senate, while Lee has been a staunch ally of the former president.
A day after announcing she was leaving the Democratic party, Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman from Hawaii and presidential candidate in 2020, is back on the campaign trail.
She’s heading to New Hampshire to appear alongside Don Bolduc, the Republican candidate for Senate there, who has been an on-and-off endorser of baseless conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen, Politico reports.
“We don’t agree on every issue, but I am honored to have the support of Tulsi Gabbard who shares my view that the status quo is broken, and we need a change of direction,” Bolduc said in a statement, according to Politico. “Tulsi is a fellow change agent and independent-minded outsider willing to speak truth to power.”
A former army general, Bolduc is trying to unseat Democratic senator Maggie Hassan, whom polls indicate has the edge in the race.
Democrats Ro Khanna in the House and Richard Blumenthal in the Senate have proposed legislation to ban US arm sales to Saudi Arabia for a year in retaliation for the Opec+ production cut.
Here’s what they had to say about the measure in a press conference held today, according to Defense News:
1/ Sen. Blumenthal/Rep. Ro Khanna hold presser on their joint bill to ban all US arms sales to Saudi for 1 year. Khanna notes Saudi planes "literally wouldn't fly" w/o US technicians: "What galls many of us in Congress is the ingratitude."
— Bryant Harris (@brykharris) October 12, 2022
2/ Blumenthal says the bill is narrowly scoped to arms sales for 1 year b/c "this relationship with Saudi Arabia is so fundamental and important, relating to Iran, relating to Israel." Still, he notes that the US-Saudi relationship has been "one-sided.'
— Bryant Harris (@brykharris) October 12, 2022
3/ Blumenthal says it's "possible" but also "questionable" if he could get this bill on NDAA when Senate votes in November. But he says there are other possible legislative vehicles to pass it like the omnibus spending bill.
— Bryant Harris (@brykharris) October 12, 2022
4/ Last thing worth noting, Blumenthal voted against the failed Senate resolution to block the Saudi AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles sale in December 2021.
— Bryant Harris (@brykharris) October 12, 2022
The measure would be yet another thing for Congress to find agreement on in the little time they have left before the year ends and the new Congress takes their seats.
'We will take action' on Saudi Arabia: Biden
President Joe Biden signaled today he is ready to retaliate against Saudi Arabia for pushing Opec+ to slash oil production.
Speaking as he was departing the White House for a trip to Colorado, Biden said, “We’re going to react to Saudi Arabia and we’re doing consultation when they come back. We will take action.”
The White House condemned the decision last week by the group of oil-producing countries in which Saudi Arabia plays a leading role to cut their output by two million barrels per-day and push oil prices higher, even as countries struggle to afford energy costs already driven higher by the war in Ukraine. The decision also could raise pump prices across the United States ahead of the 8 November midterms elections, where voters’ perceptions of the economy and the ongoing bout of inflation are likely to play a key role.
In Congress, Biden’s Democratic allies have proposed cutting off weapons sales and security assistance with Riyadh, arguing the production cut indicates it has sided with Russia in its war against Ukraine. Biden has not yet weighed in on if he supports those measures.
The New York Times has some bad news for fans of political polls. So few people are picking up the phone and talking to survey gatherers that telephone polling may soon become obsolete, its chief political analyst writes.
“I want to dwell on just how few people are answering,” Nate Cohn said in a piece discussing how polling works these days. “In the poll we have in the field right now, only 0.4 percent of dials have yielded a completed interview. If you were employed as one of our interviewers at a call center, you would have to dial numbers for two hours to get a single completed interview.”
“No, it wasn’t nearly this bad six, four or even two years ago,” he continues. “You can see for yourself that around 1.6 percent of dials yielded a completed interview in our 2018 polling.”
Political polling still hasn’t completely recovered from Donald Trump’s upset victory in 2016, when pollsters generally had his opponent Hillary Clinton in the lead until election day. While the 8 November midterm elections will provide another opportunity to gauge the accuracy of polling, Cohn warns that the firms gathering the data may need to start innovating to stay competitive in future elections.
“The Times has more resources than most organizations, but this is getting pretty close to ‘death of telephone polling’ numbers. You start wondering how much more expensive it would be to try even ridiculous options like old-fashioned door-to-door, face-to-face, in-person interviews,” Cohn writes.
In other Trumpworld news, the trial of an analyst involved in the creation of the infamous “Steele Dossier” is ongoing, with prosecutors claiming Igor Danchenko lied to the FBI, according to the Associated Press:
A Russian analyst who played a major role in the creation of a flawed dossier about Donald Trump fabricated one of his own sources and concealed the identity of another when interviewed by the FBI, prosecutors said Tuesday.
The allegations were aired during opening statements in the trial of Igor Danchenko, who is indicted on five counts of making false statements to the FBI.
The FBI interviewed Danchenko on multiple occasions in 2017 as it tried to corroborate allegations in what became known as the “Steele dossier”.
That dossier, by the British spy Christopher Steele – commissioned by Democrats during the 2016 presidential campaign – included allegations of contact between the Trump campaign and Russian government officials, as well as allegations that the Russians may have held compromising information over Trump in the form of videos showing him engaged in salacious sexual activity in a Moscow hotel.
Democrats aren’t campaigning on Trump alone. The Guardian’s Poppy Noor spoke with congressman Pat Ryan about what Democrats can learn from his come-from-behind victory in an August special election:
When Democrat Pat Ryan got elected to New York’s 19th – a largely rural district in upstate New York that swung for Trump in 2016 and only narrowly elected Biden in 2020 – people were surprised.
His contender in the August special election, Marc Molinaro, was a well-known local politician who entered the political arena when he was just 18, becoming the mayor of Tivoli, which is in the district, at 19. Molinaro was the favorite to win: leading in the polls, by as much as 10 points, right up to the moment Ryan claimed victory.
The special election was watched with bated breath, as a tight race in a swing seat that could be a harbinger in the midterm elections, where Democrats are fighting to keep a slim House majority come November. Now, people are looking at Ryan’s campaign as a political playbook for how to win other tight races across the country.
Many credit Ryan’s win to seizing the political moment around the fierce fight for abortion rights in the US.
With its reliance on Secret Service documents and focus on how Trump acted before the attack and while it was happening, the January 6 committee appears set on Thursday to dig deeper into subjects that have already produced some of the most alarming revelations from their hearings.
The Secret Service has played an increasingly prominent role in the investigation, after it was revealed the agency deleted all of their text messages from around the time of the attack, blaming it on a pre-planned equipment upgrade. The deletion sparked a federal investigation, and the Post reports that the Secret Service has since turned over more than a million pages of documents to the committee.
In a previous hearing, White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that staff in the Trump administration were worried that violence could break out on January 6. In one of the most shocking parts of the hearings, she also recounted a Secret Service official telling her Trump lunged for the steering wheel of his limo in an attempt to get agents to take him to the Capitol as it was being stormed by his supporters.
It’s unclear if the evidence presented at Thursday’s hearing, which begins at 1 pm eastern time, will further corroborate Hutchinson’s testimony. But the Post reports that lawmakers intend to show that Trump was well aware of how violent January 6 could be, and instead of taking steps to cool tensions, sought to rile up his supporters. The committee is expected to later this year release a report into the insurrection.
January 6 hearing to focus on warnings of violence ahead of insurrection
Good morning, US politics readers. Tomorrow, the January 6 committee will hold its first public hearing in more than two months, which also may be its last. According to the Washington Post, lawmakers intend to chronicle how the White House and Secret Service were warned of the potential for violence in the days leading up to the insurrection, and how Donald Trump whipped up supporters even as their threat to the Capitol became clear. Coming less than four weeks before the 8 November midterm elections, the hearing will give Democrats another opportunity to focus voters’ attention on Trump and what they say is his continued threat to democracy – but whether they’ll listen is another matter.
Here is what’s happening today:
Joe Biden heads to Colorado, where he will deliver remarks on “protecting and conserving America’s iconic outdoor spaces” at 3.30pm eastern time.
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan will discuss the Biden administration’s new security strategy at an event hosted by the Center for a New American Security and the Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service at 2:10 pm eastern time.
Two democratic lawmakers, representative Ro Khanna and senator Richard Blumenthal, will discuss legislation to stop US arms sales to Saudi Arabia over accusations it has aligned itself with Russia at 9:30 am.
