Closing summary
It’s a wrap for the first US politics blog of the week, thanks for joining us.
Donald Trump’s legal jeopardy in Georgia came into sharper focus with the seating of a special grand jury in the criminal inquiry looking at his efforts to overturn his defeat in the state to Joe Biden. The panel has the power to issue subpoenas for testimony from previously reluctant witnesses.
Here’s what else we covered today:
- Three Republican congressmen and Trump acolytes have received letters from the 6 January House panel seeking their cooperation and information about the former president’s wider push to remain in office.
- The White House gave details of Biden’s trip to an anti-tank missile production factory in Alabama tomorrow, during which he will explain the urgency of his $33bn request to Congress for more military, economic and humanitarian aid for Ukraine.
- House speaker Nancy Pelosi and a delegation of Democratic lawmakers are returning from weekend talks with Ukraine’s president Voldymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv and Poland’s president Andrzej Duda in Warsaw, as the House prepares to vote on Biden’s request.
- The US supreme court ruled unanimously that the city of Boston violated a religious group’s right to freedom of speech when it refused permission to fly a Christian flag.
- New York police veteran Thomas Webster was convicted of assaulting a fellow officer with a flag pole as he joined other Trump supporters in the deadly 6 January riot.
- Tennessee governor Bill Lee said the state was halting all executions for at least the rest of the year as the state reviews its procedures for lethal injections.
- First lady Jill Biden is heading to Europe later this week and will spend Mother’s Day with Ukrainian refugees and their children in Slovakia.
Remember you can follow developments in the Ukraine conflict on our live blog here. And please join us again tomorrow.
Amazon warehouse workers in New York overwhelmingly rejected a union bid on Monday, the Associated Press reports, the opposite result from that at another Staten Island facility last month that saw employees embrace the company’s first union representation.
Workers cast 618 votes, or about 62%, against the union, giving Amazon enough support to fend off a second labor win, and raise questions as to whether the first victory was a fluke, the agency said.
According to the National Labor Relations Board, 380 workers, or 38%, voted in favor of the grassroots union. Turnout was 61%, with about 1,600 workers eligible to vote, according to a voter list provided by Amazon.
The result is a massive blow to organizers and could stall a nationwide drive for union representation for Amazon workers.
The outcome is still pending of a union election in Bessemer, Alabama, while more than 400 challenged ballots are analyzed. Hearings to review those ballots are expected to begin in the coming weeks.
Jen Psaki said Joe Biden will be more vocal in the run up to November’s midterm elections, after she was asked if immigration and inflation issues, and the president’s low approval ratings, were weighing on the White House.
But she denied any “course correction” was needed, despite polls predicting Democrats could lose control of both chambers of Congress to Republicans in six months time:
What you can all expect to hear more from the president in the coming months, and more from other Democrats as well, is the contrast of what his agenda represents, what he is fighting for, who he is fighting for, what he is going to do to lower costs to address inflation, what he would propose to address a broken immigration system, and the contrast with the other side.
That is more about the time of year that we’re approaching, less a course correction from ongoing policy work that has been done from the beginning.
The White House is previewing tomorrow’s visit by Joe Biden to a missile manufacturing facility in Alabama that has been supplying weapons to support Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion.
The president will visit the Lockheed Martin plant in Troy in support of his request to Congress for an additional $33bn in military, economic and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
The White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at her afternoon briefing that Biden will deliver remarks about the security assistance the US is providing, including Javelin anti-tank missiles produced at the Troy factory:
[He will be] highlighting the urgency of the request to Congress to pass money quickly to help Ukraine continue to succeed against Russian aggression, and to make sure that the US and our allies can replenish our own stocks of weapons to replace what we have sent to Ukraine.
Psaki said Biden will also speak to the need for Congress to get the bipartisan innovation act to his desk:
Each Javelin missile requires more than 200 semiconductors to make, and boosting domestic chip manufacturing isn’t just critical to making more in America or lowering prices, it’s a vital component of our national security.
Passing the act means America will stay on the cutting edge of new technology. It means stronger, more resilient supply chains, and means outcompeting the rest of the world for decades to come.
Updated
How can we explain that even those Republicans who openly stand against Donald Trump seem unwilling to support the necessary steps to strengthen democracy?
Earlier this month, Liz Cheney described Russia’s attack on Ukraine as a “reminder that democracy is fragile” and talked about her obligation “to defend our democracy” – yet she doesn’t seem overly concerned with her party’s escalating voter suppression or gerrymandering efforts.
Similarly, Mitt Romney warned his audience at a private fundraiser in mid-March that “preserving liberal democracy is an extraordinary challenge” – yet he helped block legislation in the Senate that would have introduced much-needed national standards for voting rights.
In general, the few Republican lawmakers in Washington who are opposing the worst excesses of Trumpian authoritarianism have been strikingly unwilling to oppose the ongoing Republican attempts to subvert democracy on the state level.
More:
Grand jury selected in Trump Georgia investigation
A reckoning for Donald Trump over his efforts to overturn his presidential election defeat in Georgia is a step closer after the seating of a special grand jury in Atlanta.
The city’s Journal Constitution newspaper says a pool of 200 would-be jurors was reduced to 23 and three alternates over a two-hour period on Monday.
The panel will meet “intermittently” in the coming months, the newspaper says, working with prosecutors on subpoenas for documents, information and the testimony of dozens of witnesses, many of whom have been reluctant to cooperate with the criminal investigation.
As a special, rather than a regular grand jury, it does not have the power to issue indictments.
Fulton county’s district attorney, Fani Willis, announced in January she was seeking a grand jury to look into Trump’s attempts to influence the outcome of the election in the crucial swing state of Georgia, citing a refusal by numerous potential witnesses to talk without a subpoena.
In an infamous call to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, on 2 January 2021, Trump asked officials to “find” 11,780 votes to reverse Joe Biden’s victory. Raffensperger has said he felt the call was a threat to his safety.
Other incidents, such as false claims made by Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani during a legislative hearing, and the abrupt resignation of Georgia-based US attorney Byung Pak, who testified that he faced pressure from Trump, are also the subject of Willis’s 15-month inquiry, the AJC said.
The Georgia investigation is one of numerous legal cases the former president is facing as he mulls whether to launch another run for the White House in 2024.
Updated
Amazon is terminating its Covid-19 paid sick leave policy from today, according to a memo to employees seen and reported by CNN.
The online shopping giant is reverting to its pre-pandemic policy of five days excused but unpaid leave following a positive test, the network says. Previously, employees with Covid were entitled to seven days of paid leave.
In the memo, CNN says, Amazon cited the “sustained easing of the pandemic, ongoing availability of Covid-19 vaccines and treatments, and updated guidance from public health authorities”.
Accrued time off can be applied for a Covid-19 related absence, the company said, while Amazon says it will no longer notify workers of positive cases in its facilities unless required by law.
“We are monitoring conditions closely and will continue to adjust our response as appropriate,” the memo said, adding that Amazon would also discontinue its vaccine incentive program.
As CNN notes, the easing of the company’s pandemic-era policies comes amid heightened workplace activism at Amazon and multiple high-profile unionization efforts.
Workers at a Staten Island, New York, warehouse voted to form the company’s first union last month, and the count is under way for unionization at a second facility in the borough.
At a rally in New York, US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said those efforts were “just the beginning”.
Read more:
My colleague Hugo Lowell has more about the request by the House select committee investigating the US Capitol attack to three Republican members of Congress as it seeks to establish the extent of their roles in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
The panel sent letters requesting voluntary cooperation to Mo Brooks, Andy Biggs and Ronny Jackson, three congressmen who strategised ways to stop certification of Joe Biden’s election win or appeared to have connections to elements involved in the Capitol attack.
Bennie Thompson, the Democratic committee chair, told the Guardian last week the panel wanted to conduct interviews with Republicans so it could consider their testimony for its report, due to be published in September.
The panel opted against issuing subpoenas compelling testimony in the first instance, since that could cause the Republicans to attack, whereas an informal interview might at least yield some information, two sources close to the matter said.
House investigators are expected to issue further letters to Republican members of Congress, the sources said. The Guardian first reported the committee was considering letters to Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Paul Gosar, in addition to Biggs and Brooks.
The panel made a particularly expansive request to Biggs, the former head of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, outlining four lines of inquiry that investigators want to pursue with respect to his role in the weeks before 6 January.
Thompson told Biggs the committee wanted to ask him about a crucial 21 December meeting at the White House between Trump and dozens of Republicans, which produced a plan to have the then vice-president, Mike Pence, refuse to certify Biden’s win.
The letter also said the panel wanted to ask what Biggs knew of plans to stage a march from the Ellipse, near the White House, to the Capitol on 6 January, through his purported contacts with the pro-Trump activist Ali Alexander, who led the “Stop the Steal” movement after the 2020 election.
Read the full story here:
Interim summary
It’s lunchtime, and it’s been a busy morning:
- Three Republican congressmen and Donald Trump acolytes have received letters from the 6 January House panel seeking their cooperation and information about efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s election win.
- The US supreme court ruled unanimously that the city of Boston violated a religious group’s right to freedom of speech when it refused permission to fly a Christian flag.
- New York police veteran Thomas Webster was convicted of assaulting a fellow officer with a flag pole as he joined other Trump supporters in the deadly 6 January riot.
- Tennessee governor Bill Lee said the state was halting all executions for at least the rest of the year as the state reviews its procedures for lethal injections.
- First lady Jill Biden is heading to Europe later this week and will spend Mother’s Day with Ukrainian refugees and their children in Slovakia.
- House speaker Nancy Pelosi and a delegation of Democratic lawmakers are heading home after a weekend trip to Europe to talk with Ukraine’s president Voldymyr Zelenskiy and Poland’s president Andrzej Duda.
Please stick with us, there’s plenty more to come.
Updated
Axios reports that in a forthcoming book, the former defense secretary Mark Esper writes about how Donald Trump wanted to shoot anti-racism protesters in the legs.
Esper reportedly writes that the moment “was surreal, sitting in front of the Resolute desk, inside the Oval Office, with this idea weighing heavily in the air, and the president red faced and complaining loudly about the protests under way in Washington DC”.
Esper was fired by Trump after the 2020 election. His book, A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense in Extraordinary Times, is due out next week.
Trump’s wish to shoot protesters has been reported before, by Michael Bender, then of the Wall Street Journal, in his own Trump book last year.
Here’s our report on that:
Conspiracy theorist and pillow salesman Mike Lindell, a prominent mouthpiece for Donald Trump’s big lie, has been thwarted in his latest attempt to bypass a Twitter ban and slip back onto the social media platform.
Lindell was banned by Twitter permanently in January last year after continuing to post falsehoods about Trump’s election defeat following warnings to desist.
According to the Daily Beast, he set up a new account Sunday on Twitter under the handle @MikeJLindell. “Hello everybody, I’m back on Twitter,” a post purportedly by Lindell stated, before it was swiftly removed alongside the account.
A spokesperson for Twitter told the Beast the account was “permanently suspended for violating the Twitter rules on ban evasion”.
Lindell has frequently and vocally expounded the lie that Trump was cheated of victory in a fraudulent election, and despite making numerous claims he had “evidence” to back up the allegation, he has failed to produce any.
He is also facing defamation lawsuits for claims he has made about voting machines that were used in the 2020 election.
It might be no coincidence that he tried his luck with Twitter following news that the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, a self-declared “free speech absolutist”, had reached a deal to buy the platform for $44bn.
Trump’s account was also permanently suspended by Twitter last year. He stated last week that he would not reactivate it even if Musk reversed the ban, as Republican politicians have demanded.
Read more:
A federal jury has convicted a New York police department veteran of assaulting another officer during the 6 January Capitol riot, the Associated Press reports.
Thomas Webster, a 20-year NYPD veteran, was the first Capitol riot defendant to be tried on an assault charge, and the first to present a jury with a self-defense argument, the agency said.
The jury rejected his claim that he was defending himself when he tackled the officer and grabbed his gas mask. Webster, 56, testified he was trying to protect himself from a “rogue cop” who punched him in the face.
He also falsely accused the Metropolitan police department officer, Noah Rathbun, of instigating the confrontation.
Rathbun testified that he didn’t punch or pick a fight with Webster as a violent mob of Donald Trump supporters attacked the Capitol on 6 January 2021 in an effort to prevent Congress certifying Joe Biden’s election win.
Webster’s jury trial was the fourth for a Capitol riot case, the AP said. The first three ended in convictions on all charges in their respective indictments.
Webster was indicted on six counts, including that he assaulted Rathbun with a dangerous weapon, a metal flag pole. Webster wasn’t accused of entering the Capitol building.
Capitol attack committee requests cooperation from key Republicans
The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack asked three Republican members of Congress to assist the inquiry into the events of January 6 on Monday, as it seeks to establish the extent of their roles in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The panel sent letters requesting voluntary cooperation to Mo Brooks, Andy Biggs and Ronny Jackson – three House Republicans who strategized ways to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win or appeared to have connections to elements of the Capitol attack.
Congressman Bennie Thompson, the chair of the select committee, told the Guardian last week that the panel wanted to conduct interviews with Republican members of Congress involved in Trump’s efforts so that it could consider their testimony for its report in September.
The panel opted against issuing subpoenas compelling their testimony in the first instance, since that could cause them to attack the inquiry altogether whereas an informal interview might at least yield some information, according to sources close to the matter.
More details soon...
Updated
The Arkansas governor, Asa Hutchinson, is considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 and would not be deterred if Donald Trump made an expected bid to return to the White House.
“No, it won’t [deter me],” Hutchinson told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.
“I’ve made it clear. I think we ought to have a different direction in the future and so I’m not aligned with [Trump] on some of his endorsements, but also the direction he wants to take our country.
“I think he did a lot of good things for our country, but we need to go a different direction and so that’s not a factor in my decision-making process.”
Trump is free to run – and has amassed huge campaign funding – after being acquitted in his second Senate impeachment trial, in which he was charged with inciting the deadly January 6 Capitol attack, in his attempt to overturn defeat by Joe Biden.
More than 20 years ago, Hutchinson was a House impeachment manager in the trial of Bill Clinton, over the 42nd president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. As Arkansas governor, Hutchinson now operates in the more moderate lane of Republican politics.
On CNN, he was asked about an appearance last week at a “Politics & Eggs” event in New Hampshire, a “traditional stop for any presidential hopeful” in an early voting state.
“You’ve got to get through course this year,” he said, “but that’s an option that’s on the table. And that’s one of the reasons I was in New Hampshire.”
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Supreme Court says Boston's Christian flag ban was unlawful
Supreme Court justices have ruled unanimously that the city of Boston violated a religious group’s first amendment rights when it banned it flying a Christian flag from a municipal flagpole.
The group Camp Christian intended flying its flag, with a cross on it, at City Hall as part of a program that allows private groups use the flagpole while holding events in the plaza below, Reuters reports.
In legal filings, the group, led by conservative activist Harold Shurtleff, argued that the city had approved more than 280 flags over a dozen years but rejected only theirs.
In one of his final rulings, the retiring liberal justice Stephen Breyer, backed by all eight fellow justices, said Boston violated Shurtleff’s freedom of speech:
Boston did not make the raising and flying of private groups’ flags a form of government speech. That means, in turn, that Boston’s refusal to let Shurtleff and Camp Constitution raise their flag based on its religious viewpoint ‘abridg[ed]’ their ‘freedom of speech’.
The city’s lack of meaningful involvement in the selection of flags or the crafting of their messages leads us to classify the flag raisings as private, not government, speech, though nothing prevents Boston from changing its policies going forward.
The city argued flying the flag would have constituted “impermissible government speech”.
Camp Constitution was backed by Joe Biden’s administration in its case, Reuters said.
Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, said Monday the state was pausing executions to enable an independent review of its lethal injection procedures, the Associated Press reports.
The execution of convicted triple-murderer Oscar Smith was called off last month an hour before it was due to take place, officials blaming a “testing oversight”.
In a statement, Lee, a Republican, said former US attorney Ed Stanton will review circumstances surrounding the testing of lethal injection chemicals, the clarity of the lethal injection process manual and Tennessee corrections department staffing considerations:
I review each death penalty case and believe it is an appropriate punishment for heinous crimes,.
However, the death penalty is an extremely serious matter, and I expect the Tennessee Department of Correction to leave no question that procedures are correctly followed.
The moratorium will remain in effect through the end of the year to allow time for the review and corrective action, Lee said.
The execution of Smith, 72, was halted on 21 April. Lee’s statement that evening gave few details, saying it was postponed “due to an oversight in preparation for lethal injection.”
Read more:
Updated
The first lady, Jill Biden, will spend Mother’s Day meeting with Ukrainian mothers and children who fled Ukraine following the Russian invasion, the White House has announced.
Biden will visit Slovakia and Romania during her five-day trip that begins on Thursday, the Associated Press reports.
Almost 5.5m Ukrainian refugees have left their country, mostly women and children, according to UN officials. Many have resettled in neighboring countries or relocated elsewhere in Europe.
Romania and Slovakia, both members of Nato, share borders with Ukraine.
According to the White House, Biden will also meet with American service members, US embassy personnel, humanitarian aid workers and educators. The trip will begin in Romania, and Biden will be in Kosice and Vysne Nemecke, Slovakia, for Mother’s Day on 8 May.
The trip will be the first lady’s second overseas by herself, following her journey to Tokyo last year for the opening of the delayed 2020 Olympic Games, the AP said.
Updated
Speaking at a rally two days ahead of voting in a heated Republican Senate primary in Ohio, Donald Trump appeared to forget the name of JD Vance, the candidate he has endorsed.
“You know,” the former president told a crowd in Greenwood, Nebraska, on Sunday, “we’ve endorsed Dr Oz.”
So he has, in Pennsylvania.
Of Ohio, Trump said: “We’ve endorsed – JP, right? JD Mandel, and he’s doing great. They’re all doing good. They’re all doing good. And let’s see what happens.””
Trump appeared to be confusing JD Vance, a former US marine, author of the bestseller Hillbilly Elegy and venture capitalist, with Josh Mandel, a rival who courted Trump for the endorsement.
Trump also said: “I think Vance is doing well, I think Oz is doing well. Does everybody like Oz? I love Oz.”
Announcing his endorsement last month, Trump said: “In the great state of Ohio, the candidate most qualified and ready to win in November is JD Vance. We cannot play games. It is all about winning!”
Vance said then he was “incredibly honored to have President Trump’s support”. He did not immediately comment about Trump’s slip on Sunday.
Trump’s endorsement – despite past remarks in which Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler” and “a moral disaster” – boosted Vance to the top of the polls in Ohio. On Sunday, Mandel continued to hammer his opponent for such remarks, including saying in 2016 he might vote for Hillary Clinton if it seemed Trump might win.
Another candidate, Mike Gibbons, told donors in an email reported by Politico: “To be fair, you really can’t blame Trump. No one knows who the real JD Vance is, as his views change faster than the weather in Ohio.”
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US lawmakers head home after Kyiv, Warsaw discussions
Nancy Pelosi and a delegation of Democratic lawmakers are heading back to Washington DC today to finalize Joe Biden’s $33bn request to Congress for Ukraine aid, after a whistlestop European tour.
The House speaker met on Monday in Warsaw with Poland’s president Andrzej Duda, thanking the country on behalf of the American people for “opening their hearts and homes” to almost 3m Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russia’s war in their homeland.
A day earlier, Pelosi and Congress members made a high-profile visit to Kyiv to discuss the conflict with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other government leaders, and Biden’s proposed financial package that would almost double previous US spending on Ukraine.
“Our members discussed our countries’ continued commitment to Ukraine, particularly as the Congress prepares to transform President Biden’s new request for additional security, economic and humanitarian assistance into legislation,” Pelosi wrote in a statement after the Duda meeting.
The speaker was joined on the trip by Democratic representatives Jim McGovern and Bill Keating of Massachusetts; Adam Schiff and Barbara Lee of California, Gregory Meeks of New York, and Jason Crow of Colorado, according to The Hill.
Despite her comments, a vote to approve the White House request – $20bn in military aid, $8.5bn in economic assistance and $3bn in humanitarian relief – will likely have to wait. The House is not sitting this week while members attend to in-district business.
“If I were speaker for a day, I’d call Congress back into session, back into work,” the Texas Republican Michael McCaul, ranking member of the House foreign affairs committee, told ABC’s This Week on Sunday.
“Time is of the essence. The next two to three weeks are going to be very pivotal and very decisive in this war. And I don’t think we have a lot of time to waste.”
But McCaul was confident that Biden’s ask would be approved swiftly.
You can expect the White House press secretary Jen Psaki to face questions about it at her afternoon briefing.
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Updated
Good morning blog readers, happy Monday and welcome to a new week in US politics.
Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, is in Warsaw today, discussing the Ukraine conflict with Poland’s president Andrzej Duda.
The final stop of a busy European tour, which also saw her in Kyiv over the weekend meeting Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, comes as lawmakers in Washington DC weigh up Joe Biden’s request for an additional $33bn in military, economic and humanitarian aid for Ukraine.
The House is not in session this week, but the Republican ranking member of the foreign affairs committee, Michael McCaul, said he expects the chamber to move quickly on the president’s request.
Developments in the Ukraine-Russia war can be found on our main news blog here.
Here’s what we’re watching in the US:
- Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican party will be tested in congressional and governors’ primary elections beginning this week. Over the weekend Trump forgot the name of one candidate he endorsed, and promoted another in entirely the wrong state.
- Joe Biden also has trouble in spades, with inflation, immigration and crime weighing on Democrats’ chances of retaining control of Congress in November’s midterms. The president has two public engagements today, the civil service Presidential Rank awards and a White House reception to mark the end of Ramadan.
- The White House press secretary Jen Psaki will brief reporters at 2.30pm.
