Summary of the day
Here is a recap of today’s developments:
The letter to Donald Trump by special counsel Jack Smith identifying him as a “target” in the justice department’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection reportedly listed the federal statutes under which the former president could be charged. The letter mentions three federal statutes: conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud the United States, deprivation of rights under color of law, and tampering with a witness, victim or an informant, according to several sources, citing sources familiar with the matter.
Donald Trump sought to downplay his legal challenges while railing against special counsel Jack Smith and the justice department, after announcing he had received a letter naming him as the target of the DoJ’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “I didn’t know practically what a subpoena was and grand juries. Now I’m becoming an expert. I have no choice,” he said on Tuesday night. Trump could face a new indictment as early as the end of the week.
A federal judge has rejected Donald Trump’s request for a new trial in a civil case brought by E Jean Carroll, where a jury found that he sexually abused her and awarded her $5m in damages. US district judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan ruled that the jury did not reach a “seriously erroneous result” and that the 9 May verdict was not a “miscarriage of justice”.
A judge rejected Donald Trump’s bid to move his hush money criminal case to federal court, ruling that the former president had failed to meet a high legal bar for changing jurisdiction. The decision sets the stage for Trump to stand trial in state court in Manhattan as early as next spring, overlapping with the 2024 presidential primary season.
Allies of Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis are reportedly pressing for a shake-up of his campaign amid financial pressure and flagging poll numbers. His campaign manager, Generra Peck, is “hanging by a thread”, according to a DeSantis donor who is close to the campaign, after fewer than 10 staffers were laid off last week.
Robert Kennedy Jr, a long-shot Democratic candidate for US president, has a long history of racism, antisemitism and xenophobia, and should be denied a national platform, according to a damning report seen by the Guardian.
Half a dozen House Republicans would reportedly support a measure to censure George Santos, the Republican congressman whose résumé has been shown to be largely fabricated and who has pleaded not guilty to 13 counts of fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds.
The Republican-led House in Alabama approved a new congressional map that would increase the percentage of Black voters – but not by enough, said Black lawmakers who called the map an insult to Black Alabamians and the supreme court.
Wesleyan University announced it would end legacy admissions, after the supreme court struck down affirmative action in the college admission process last month. A small number of schools have ended the practice of legacy admissions, including Johns Hopkins, MIT and Amherst college.
The department of justice said that it is assessing the situation by the Texas-Mexico border following “troubling reports” that have emerged over Texas troopers’ treatment of migrants.
Alabama House approves congressional map 'a slap in the face' to supreme court decision, say Black lawmakers
The Republican-led House in Alabama approved a new congressional map on Wednesday that would increase the percentage of Black voters – but not by enough, said Black lawmakers who called the map an insult to Black Alabamians and the supreme court.
The House of Representatives voted 74-27 to approve the GOP plan, which came after a supreme court opinion last month found lawmakers previously drew districts that unlawfully dilute the political power of its Black residents in violation of the Voting Rights Act. The bill now moves to the Alabama Senate.
While Black people make up about 27% of Alabama’s population, only one of the state’s seven districts is majority-Black.
The GOP plan does not establish the second majority-Black district sought by plaintiffs who won the supreme court case, instead it increases the percentage of Black voters to 42% in the district, AP reported.
Representative Barbara Drummond, speaking during the floor debate, said:
This is really a slap in the face, not only to Black Alabamians, but to the supreme court.
“Once again, the state decided to be on the wrong side of history,” Representative Prince Chestnut said.
Once again the (Republican) super majority decided that the voting rights of Black people are nothing that this state is bound to respect. And it’s offensive. It’s wrong.
Half a dozen House Republicans would reportedly support a measure to censure George Santos, the Republican congressman whose résumé has been shown to be largely fabricated and who has pleaded not guilty to 13 counts of fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds.
House Democrats unveiled a resolution on Monday to formally reprimand Santos for blatantly lying to voters about his life story.
Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, Anthony D’Esposito, Marc Molinaro, Nick Langworthy, and Max Miller have all said that they would support the Democrats’ resolution, according to an Axios report. With Republicans holding a 10-seat House majority, it could take as few as five GOP defections for the measure to pass.
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A banal dystopia where manipulative content is so cheap to make and so easy to produce on a massive scale that it becomes ubiquitous: that’s the political future digital experts are worried about in the age of generative artificial intelligence (AI).
In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, social media platforms were vectors for misinformation as far-right activists, foreign influence campaigns and fake news sites worked to spread false information and sharpen divisions.
Four years later, the 2020 election was overrun with conspiracy theories and baseless claims about voter fraud that were amplified to millions, fueling an anti-democratic movement to overturn the election.
Now, as the 2024 presidential election comes into view, experts warn that advances in AI have the potential to take the disinformation tactics of the past and breathe new life into them.
AI-generated disinformation not only threatens to deceive audiences, but also erode an already embattled information ecosystem by flooding it with inaccuracies and deceptions, experts say.
Judge rejects Donald Trump's bid to move hush money case to federal court
A judge has rejected Donald Trump’s bid to move his hush money criminal case to federal court, ruling that the former president had failed to meet a high legal bar for changing jurisdiction.
US district judge Alvin Hellerstein’s decision sets the stage for Trump to stand trial in state court in Manhattan as early as next spring, overlapping with the 2024 presidential primary season, AP reported.
Manhattan prosecutors charged Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to hide reimbursements made to his then fixer, Michael Cohen, for his role in paying $130,000 to the adult film star, Stormy Daniels, ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Trump’s lawyers had argued that the case should be moved from New York state court to federal court because he was being prosecuted for an act under the “color of his office” as president.
Judge Hellerstein scoffed at the defense claims, finding that the allegations pertained to Trump’s personal life, not presidential duties that would have merited a move to federal court. He wrote in a 25-page ruling:
The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the matter was a purely a personal item of the President – a cover-up of an embarrassing event.
Hush money paid to an adult film star is not related to a President’s official acts. It does not reflect in any way the color of the President’s official duties.
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The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, refused to weigh in on whether Donald Trump should face charges over the January 6th insurrection.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell refuses to comment on the legitimacy of Donald Trump potentially being charged in relation to the January 6th Capitol insurrection:
— The Recount (@therecount) July 19, 2023
“I’m not gonna comment on the various candidates for the presidency.” pic.twitter.com/ISODvPdJDy
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Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders has also reportedly developed a relationship with her former boss Donald Trump’s rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Sanders attended a retreat with prominent DeSantis donors last year, and Axios reports that she has become close to DeSantis’s wife, Casey, since their experiences with cancer in recent years.
One senior Republican told the news website:
Sarah reached out to Casey during her treatments and the same thing happened when Sarah had her experience.
Sanders, 40, is the country’s youngest governor and her allies believe she is positioning herself for a possible presidency run in 2028 or 2032, the report says.
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Tensions between Donald Trump and his former press secretary, Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, have grown over her neutrality in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, according to an Axios report.
The report outlines how Sanders’s team told the Trump campaign that she wouldn’t make endorsement until after her first legislative session in Arkansas. That session ended in May.
Sanders is among several Republicans who have so far stayed neutral in the presidential primary, but Trump sees her in a different category because he hired her to be his press secretary and endorsed her when she ran for governor in 2021, the report writes.
Trump reportedly asked Sanders for her endorsement in a phone call earlier this year and she declined, according to the New York Times. Trump denied the report in March, writing:
I never asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders for an endorsement. I give endorsements, I don’t generally ask for them. With that being said, nobody has done more for her than I have, with the possible exception of her great father, Mike!
Three weeks after the NYT story was published, Mike Huckabee, Sanders’s father, publicly endorsed Trump on his TV show.
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Donald Trump has reportedly been seething about the potential new indictment, as he reached out to his top allies to strategize how they could help defend him against potential criminal charges over his effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump spoke with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House GOP conference chair Elise Stefanik, according to sources, CNN reported.
The former president’s call with Stefanik, who leads the House GOP’s messaging efforts, was described as a “long conversation” where the two went over plans to go on the offense on alleged weaponization of the federal government, the report says.
Trump asked things like “Can you believe this?” and used vulgarities to vent his displeasure, Politico reported.
Donald Trump’s rivals have largely shied away from criticizing his legal woes, with most of the Republican presidential candidates choosing instead to portray the former president’s pending prosecution as a perversion of justice.
Besides Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, who have long made clear their view that Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election should disqualify him from reelection, there was no discernible movement within the former president’s party against him, according to a NBC report.
“This could be different,” said Terry Sullivan, who served as campaign manager for Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 GOP presidential bid.
Now that being said, Mission Impossible 9 could be different than the first eight Mission Impossibles, but it’s unlikely. It’s likely to end the same way the first eight did.
Trump’s rivals boxed themselves in on the former president, the January 6 insurrection and the criminal charges against him, the report continues.
That won’t change unless there’s a massive shift in opinion among Republican primary voters, and Trump’s most prominent rivals are in no position to try to lead such a movement because they already have weighed in on the indictments and Jan. 6.
A group of 200 lawmakers said they have agreed not to intervene if UPS workers go on strike, Reuters reports.
The world’s biggest package delivery firm and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters have until midnight on 31 July to reach a contract deal covering some 340,000 workers that sort, load and deliver packages in the United States.
“We are hopeful that both sides can negotiate in good faith and reach a consensus agreement,” the lawmakers said, adding if no deal is reached they have committed to respect the rights of workers “to withhold their labor and initiate and participate in a strike.”
UPS workers are currently calling for better pay, more full-time jobs and better workplace health and safety conditions.
Despite UPS tentatively agreeing to make Martin Luther King Jr Day a holiday and to install ACs in more of its trucks as temperatures rise, the union for UPS workers said that the company had not agreed to all of its demands.
Should a strike happen, Bloomberg estimates that the company could lose a staggering $170m a day.
For further details on how likely a UPS workers strike is, click here:
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DoJ assessing Texas-Mexico border situation amid 'troubling reports'
The department of justice said that it is assessing the situation by the Texas-Mexico border following “troubling reports” that have emerged over Texas troopers’ treatment of migrants.
Speaking to CNN, DoJ spokesperson Xochitl Hinojosa said, “The department is aware of the troubling reports, and we are working with DHS and other relevant agencies to assess the situation.”
Earlier this week, the Houston Chronicle reported email exchanges between a trooper and a superior over alleged mistreatment of migrants crossing the border.
The emails alleged that officers working along the border have been ordered to push small children and nursing babies back into the Rio Grande, and have also told to not give water to migrants, despite scorching temperatures.
“Due to the extreme heat, the order to not give people water needs to be immediately reversed as well,” the trooper wrote, adding, “I believe we have stepped over a line into the inhumane.”
A statement released by Abbott’s office on Tuesday pushed back against the allegations, saying:
“No orders or directions have been given under Operation Lone Star that would compromise the lives of those attempting to cross the border illegally.”
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Amid speculation about whether or not Rudy Giuliani has “flipped” on Donald Trump in the federal investigation of the former president’s election subversion and incitement of the January 6 attack on Congress, one former Trump White House insider had a somewhat…dry response.
The former New York mayor turned Trump adviser and lawyer might have turned on his boss “Cause they don’t have happy hour up the river”, the former insider said in a message viewed by the Guardian.
Reports of Giuliani’s fondness for alcohol are legion. “Up the river” is, according to Collins dictionary, an American idiom meaning to be sent “to or confined in a penitentiary”.
Speculation about Giuliani flowered on Tuesday after Trump announced that he had received a letter naming him as a target in the investigation led by the special counsel Jack Smith.
CNN said Giuliani “did a voluntary interview with special counsel investigators several weeks back” and “his lawyer does not expect him to be charged”.
That lawyer, Ted Goodman, said: “Any speculation that Mayor Rudy Giuliani ‘flipped’ against President Donald Trump is as false as previous lies that America’s Mayor” – Giuliani’s post-9/11 nickname – “was somehow a Russian Agent.
“In order to ‘flip’ on President Trump – as so many in the anti-Trump media are fantasising over – Mayor Giuliani would’ve had to commit perjury, because all the information he has regarding this case points to President Trump’s innocence.”
Many observers pointed out that Giuliani, whose law licenses have come under review arising from his work for Trump, may not be out of the woods on the other investigation of Trump’s election subversion, in Fulton county, Georgia.
Some further reading:
Trump could face new indictment within days after target letter
The letter identifying Donald Trump as a target in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection could mean that the former president face a new indictment as early as the end of the week.
“A third indictment appears to be forthcoming,” Brookings Institution senior fellow Benjamin Wittes posted on the Lawfare blog, adding:
It’s reasonable to expect the grand jury to act as early as the end of this week.
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The Republican governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, has announced he will not be running for re-election next year.
After much consideration, I have decided not to run for another term as Governor in 2024.
— Chris Sununu (@ChrisSununu) July 19, 2023
Be assured we will keep working and that the Granite State will continue to be our priority for the next 18 months. pic.twitter.com/VSNNd9BlaA
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Wesleyan University announced it would end legacy admissions, after the supreme court struck down affirmative action in the college admission process last month.
In a statement on Wednesday, university president Michael Roth said legacies – a practice that favors relatives of alumni – had played a “negligible role” in the school’s admission process for many years. He added:
Nevertheless, in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision regarding affirmative action, we believe it important to formally end admission preference for ‘legacy applicants’.
Relatives of Wesleyan alumni will continue to be admitted to the school “on their own merits”, Roth said.
Legacy admissions came under fire after the nation’s highest court ruled that schools could not give preferential treatment to applicants based on race or ethnicity.
A small number of schools have ended the practice, including Johns Hopkins, MIT and Amherst college.
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News that Donald Trump may imminently face another indictment drew shrugs from some Republicans and a muddled response from his rivals, according to a New York Times report.
The former president’s indictments, past and pending, are becoming the background music of the 2024 presidential campaign, the paper writes.
At one Republican congressional fund-raising lunch on Tuesday in Washington, the news of a likely third Trump indictment went entirely unmentioned, an attendee said. Some opposing campaigns’ strategists all but ignored the development.
E Jean Carroll’s lawyer, Robbie Kaplan, has released a statement following the judge’s decision to deny Donald Trump’s request for a new trial.
The statement reads:
Now that the court has denied Trump’s motion for a new trial or to decrease the amount of the verdict, E Jean Carroll looks forward to receiving the $5 million in damages that the jury awarded her in Carroll II.
“Carroll II” is how lawyers in the case refer to the May lawsuit that resulted in a jury finding Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer and awarded her $5m in damages.
Trump jokes about his legal challenges after receiving target letter
Donald Trump sought to downplay his legal challenges while railing against special counsel Jack Smith and the justice department, after announcing he had received a letter naming him as the target of the DoJ’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump, headlining a Republican county meeting in eastern Iowa on Tuesday night, attacked federal investigators as he tried to make light of what could be his third criminal indictment since March. He said:
I didn’t know practically what a subpoena was and grand juries. Now I’m becoming an expert. I have no choice.
Trump also taped an interview on Tuesday night with Fox News host Sean Hannity, who opened the town hall event by saying that the former president didn’t seem to be bothered by “never-ending attacks”.
“It bothers me,” Trump replied, adding:
It’s a disgrace what’s happening to our country.
The letter to Donald Trump by special counsel Jack Smith identifying him as a “target” in the justice department’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection listed the federal statutes under which the former president could be charged, according to multiple reports.
Trump announced on Tuesday morning that his attorneys handed him a letter from Smith as he was having dinner on Sunday night. Posting to his Truth Social website, Trump wrote:
Deranged Jack Smith, the prosecutor with Joe Biden’s DOJ, sent a letter … stating that I am a TARGET of the January 6th Grand Jury investigation, and giving me a very short 4 days to report to the Grand Jury, which almost always means an Arrest and an Indictment.
The letter indicates that a new indictment of the former president could be imminent.
It mentions three federal statutes: conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud the United States, deprivation of rights under color of law, and tampering with a witness, victim or an informant, according to ABC and the Wall Street Journal, citing sources familiar with the matter.
The context surrounding the statutes cited in the target letter is unclear, and their citation in the letter does not necessarily mean that Trump will be charged with related counts.
There are no additional details in the letter and it does not say how Smith’s office claims Trump may have violated the statutes listed, sources told ABC.
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DeSantis' campaign manager 'hanging by a thread' as he lags behind Trump - report
Allies of Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis are pressing for a shake-up of his campaign amid financial pressure and flagging poll numbers.
DeSantis has reduced campaign staff as his campaign has struggled to meet fundraising goals, as he lags substantially in second place behind former president Donald Trump. Fewer than 10 staffers were laid off last week, according to an anonymous staffer, reported Politico.
His campaign manager, Generra Peck, is also “hanging by a thread”, according to a DeSantis donor who is close to the campaign, reported NBC.
Some allies have communicated that they want DeSantis to fire Peck or demote her, according to two other sources. One donor told the news channel:
It is the chatter among donors, and it extends beyond the first rung of the bundler class. Money people are losing confidence quickly. It’s time for that kind of change. It’s time for a shake-up at the top.
The idea that more shake-ups within the campaign is widely held among Republicans, according to conversations NBC had with strategists and donors.
Even in DeSantis’s home state of Florida, Trump still has a 20-point lead over the governor, according to a recent Florida Atlantic University poll.
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Wisconsin’s top elections administrator was interviewed this spring by federal investigators as part of the special counsel’s probe into the 2020 election, NBC reported.
Meagan Wolfe, the Wisconsin elections commission administrator, answered questions from the FBI and justice department officials in person in April, according to her spokesperson.
Election leaders in Wisconsin’s two largest cities, Milwaukee and Madison, have also spoken with investigators as part of the justice departments probe.
Investigators working for special counsel Jack Smith have interviewed officials from all seven battleground states targeted by Donald Trump and his allies as they sought to overturn the 2020 election results, according to CNN.
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In a 59-page decision rejecting Donald Trump’s request for a new trial in a civil case brought by E Jean Carroll, a federal judge said the jury’s May verdict was not seriously erroneous or a serious miscarriage of justice.
“There is no basis for disturbing the jury’s sexual assault damages,” US district judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan wrote in his ruling.
And Mr. Trump’s arguments with respect to the defamation damages are no stronger.
Carroll’s lawsuit, filed in 2022, said Trump raped her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York in the mid-1990s, and defamed her by denying it happened.
On 9 May, a jury found Trump had sexually abused Carroll. The former president’s lawyers said the jury’s $2m award for the sexual abuse portion of the verdict was “excessive” because the jury had found that Carroll was not raped.
Judge Kaplan ruled:
The definition of rape in the New York Penal Law is far narrower than the meaning of ‘rape’ in common modern parlance, its definition in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes, and elsewhere.
The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’ Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.
Judge appears inclined to delay Trump classified documents trial into 2024
The reality of conducting pre-trial proceedings under Cipa is that Cannon’s trial date still has the potential to be pushed back. In the prosecution of former NSA analyst Reality Winner, the trial date was delayed multiple times during the discovery phase.
The consequences of an extended delay could be far-reaching. If the case is not adjudicated until after the 2024 election and Donald Trump is re-elected, he could try to pardon himself or direct the attorney general to have the justice department drop the case.
Ahead of the pre-trial conference, Trump’s lawyers Todd Blanche and Chris Kise argued in court filings that Cannon should not bother setting a tentative trial date until the major pre-trial motions were finished because they could not know how long classified discovery might take.
The Trump legal team also claimed that going to trial before the 2024 presidential election – prosecutors have outlined a schedule for a trial date in December – would be unrealistic because of supposed challenges in selecting an impartial jury.
In their reply last week, prosecutors took aim at Trump’s arguments for an indefinite delay, rejecting the claims that the charges touched on novel legal issues or that the discovery process was uniquely complex.
“The defendants are, of course, free to make whatever arguments they like for dismissal,” the prosecutors wrote. “But they should not be permitted to gesture at a baseless legal argument, call it ‘novel,’ and then claim the court will require an indefinite continuance.”
The filing took particular issue with the Trump’s lawyers’ suggestion that any trial should be delayed until after the 2024 election because of the supposed difficulty in selecting an impartial jury. Prosecutors wrote:
To be sure, the government readily acknowledges that jury selection here may merit additional protocols (such as a questionnaire) that may be more time-consuming than in other cases, but those are reasons to start the process sooner rather than later.
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In response to pointed questions from US district court judge Aileen Cannon, prosecutors seemed to acknowledge that their timetable for a December trial date was aggressive, although Cannon also separately told Trump’s lawyers she could not indefinitely postpone setting a trial date as they had requested.
Trump was charged last month with retaining national defense information, including US nuclear secrets and plans for US retaliation in the event of an attack, which means his case will be tried under the rules laid out in the Classified Information Procedures Act, or Cipa.
The statute was passed in the 1980s to protect the government against the “graymail” problem in national security cases, a tactic in which the defense threatens to reveal classified information at trial, betting that the government would prefer to drop the charges rather than risk disclosure.
While Cipa established a mechanism through which the government can safely charge cases involving classified documents, the series of steps that has to be followed means it takes longer to get to trial compared with regular criminal cases without national security implications.
Trump and his valet, Walt Nauta, have pleaded not guilty. The pair are currently co-defendants, though Nauta’s lawyer Stanley Woodward said – in arguing for an indefinite postponement – he might move to “sever” and seek a standalone trial for his client after reviewing the discovery.
The federal judge presiding over Donald Trump’s classified documents case signaled that she could delay the trial until 2024, appearing inclined to find that the matter was sufficiently complex after hearing arguments from prosecutors and the former president’s lawyers on Tuesday.
The US district court judge Aileen Cannon did not rule from the bench on a timetable during the roughly two-hour pre-trial conference at the courthouse in Fort Pierce, Florida, and concluded the hearing by saying she would enter a written order at a later date.
Prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing the documents case and the investigation into Trump’s efforts to obstruct the transfer of power, had asked Cannon last week to reject Trump’s suggestion to postpone the trial until after the 2024 election.
The dueling requests from Trump and the justice department present an early test for Cannon, a Trump appointee who is under heightened scrutiny for issuing favorable rulings to the former president during the criminal investigation, before they were overturned on appeal.
Cannon appeared skeptical of arguments from both sides at the hearing, telling prosecutors she was unaware of any trial involving classified information that went to trial in six months and telling Trump’s lawyers that the 2024 election would not factor into her scheduling decisions.
The judge said at issue was whether the documents case was sufficiently “complex” – because of novel legal issues and the volume of discovery materials that prosecutors will turn over to the defence – to warrant a timetable that would delay pre-trial proceedings beyond December.
Former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, who Donald Trump pressured to overturn the 2020 election, has been cooperating with special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection, NBC reported.
NBC News confirms: Ex-Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey has been cooperating with the Special Counsel's investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 19, 2023
Reminder: Trump called Ducey after he certified Biden's 2020 election win in the state. @NBCNews
A spokesperson for Ducey yesterday confirmed that Smith’s team had contacted the former governor. “Yes, he’s been contacted. He’s been responsive, and just as he’s done since the election, he will do the right thing,” they told CNN.
Trump narrowly lost Arizona to Joe Biden by less than 11,000 votes. In a phone call after his defeat, Trump tried to pressure Ducey to find fraud in the state’s election results that would help him overturn his loss, according to sources.
Trump also reportedly repeatedly asked his vice president, Mike Pence, to call Ducey and prod him to find evidence to substantiate Trump’s claims of fraud. Pence called Ducey several times to discuss the election, according to sources.
Women who sued Texas after saying they were denied abortions despite serious risks to their health are headed to court on Wednesday as legal challenges to abortion bans across the US continue a year after the fall of Roe v Wade.
The Texas case is believed to be the first brought by women who were denied abortions since the right to an abortion in the US was overturned, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is representing them.
The case before a Texas judge in Austin does not seek to reverse the state’s abortion ban, which is one of the strictest in the country. It instead asks the court for clarity on when exceptions are allowed in Texas, where the women say they were told they could not end their pregnancies even though their lives and health were in danger.
One woman had to carry her baby, who was missing much of her skull, for months, knowing she would bury her daughter soon after she was born. Others had to travel out of state to receive medical care for pregnancy-related complications after doctors recommended an abortion.
Texas doctors who perform abortions risk life in prison and fines of up to $100,000, leaving many women with providers who are unwilling to even discuss terminating a pregnancy.
Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F Kennedy’s Jr’s wife, Emmy-nominated actor Cheryl Hines, has not publicly commented on her husband’s claim that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to “attack Caucasians and Black people”.
A spokesperson for the Curb Your Enthusiasm star told the Daily Beast that Hines had received too many “daily requests” to weigh in on her husband’s comments.
The spokesperson instead directed the website to a New York Times profile of Hines published last month, in which she paused for nearly a minute and had no “clear answer” when asked how she and her husband diverge politically. Hines told the paper:
I support Bobby and I want to be there for him, and I want him to feel loved and supported by me. And at the same time, I don’t feel the need to go to every political event, because I do have my own career.
Hines has publicly disowned her husband’s remarks at least once before. In January 2022, Kennedy went so far as to compare the US under lockdown to Germany under the Nazis, telling a rally in Washington:
Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.
Hines posted on Twitter that Kennedy’s views were “not a reflection of my own”, adding that “while we love each other, we differ on many current issues.”
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As the son of former attorney general Robert Kennedy, and nephew of former president John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy Jr has caused one of America’s most storied political dynasties with his toxic views.
In 2019 three relatives wrote an opinion column for the Politico website condemning his anti-vaccine advocacy, which they held partially responsible for a measles outbreak.
The Congressional Integrity Project contends that Kennedy is a “Republican stooge” who is being embraced by the far right in an attempt to damage Joe Biden. He has become a regular guest on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and other rightwing outlets. Far-right provocateurs Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones and Michael Flynn have praised him.
Now Republicans have invited Kennedy to Congress. On Thursday he is due to address the House of Representatives’ select subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government during a hearing to examine “the federal government’s role in censoring Americans”. The panel is chaired by Trump loyalist Jim Jordan, who has been criticised for launching bogus investigations into Biden.
Kyle Herrig, executive director of Congressional Integrity Project, said:
Giving RFK Jr a platform to spread dangerous conspiracy theories and xenophobic and antisemitic rhetoric is a new low for Jim Jordan – and that says something.
Jim Jordan should stop the charade and disinvite RFK Jr immediately. Allowing this hearing to go forward is shameless and beyond the pale. Maga Republicans desperation is on full display this week, proving once again that they have no credibility to conduct legitimate investigations.
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Donald Trump loses bid for new trial in E Jean Carroll case
A federal judge has rejected Donald Trump’s request for a new trial in a civil case brought by E Jean Carroll, where a jury found that he sexually abused her and awarded her $5m in damages.
US district judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan ruled on Wednesday that the jury did not reach a “seriously erroneous result” and that the 9 May verdict was not a “miscarriage of justice”.
Carroll’s lawsuit, filed in 2022, said Trump raped her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York in the mid-1990s, and defamed her by denying it happened.
Trump’s lawyers had argued that the jury’s $2m award for the sexual abuse portion of the verdict was “excessive” because the jury had found that Carroll was not raped, and that the conduct Carroll alleged did not cause any diagnosed mental injury.
The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents case on Wednesday denied the proposed protective order for discovery materials submitted by prosecutors because both sides had not sufficiently discussed the matter.
The protective order is needed for prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith to start making the classified documents that they intend to use at trial available to Trump’s team in discovery.
Trump was charged last month with retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club, including US unclear secrets. As a result, his trial will take place according to the rules set out in the Classified Information Procedures Act, or Cipa.
The denial by the US district court judge Aileen Cannon of the protective order – required under Section 3 of Cipa – will add another delay to pre-trial proceedings.
The complex procedures in Cipa, which exist to protect against the defense threatening to suddenly reveal classified information at trial, means the pre-trial phase takes longer compared to standard criminal cases.
Legal experts had always expected Trump to object to the protective order because his team wants to delay until after the 2024 election in the hope that the matter becomes moot if he wins re-election, but for the judge to deny the protective order is unusual.
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For years, the Congressional Integrity Project’s document says, Robert Kennedy Jr has targeted a particularly dangerous form of vaccine denial at Black people. In 2021 at the height of the Covid-19 vaccination campaign, he released Medical Racism, a film that promoted disproven claims about the dangers of vaccines and explicitly warned communities of color to be suspicious of “sinister” vaccination campaigns.
Several doctors and experts who participated in the film later denounced it and said they felt used and misled about the message of the documentary. Richard Allen Williams, founder of the Association of Black Cardiologists, called Children’s Health Defense “absolutely a racist operation” particularly dangerous to the Black community.
In 2017, as a measles outbreak devastated Minnesota’s Somali-American community due to low vaccination rates, Kennedy continued to push his false claims that “science and anecdotal evidence suggest that Africans and African Americans may be particularly vulnerable to vaccine injuries including autism”.
In a 2020 interview, Kennedy asserted without evidence that “People with African blood react differently to vaccines than people with Caucasian blood. They’re much more sensitive.”
The following year, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Kennedy recorded a webinar encouraging Black people to be skeptical of vaccines, claiming: “There has been abundant evidence... beyond any dispute that Blacks are disproportionately harmed by vaccine injury,” adding:
Blacks react completely differently to vaccines ... we now know it’s just one huge experiment on Black Americans, and they know what is happening and they are doing nothing.
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Robert Kennedy Jr’s racist, antisemitic and xenophobic views go back decades, report says
Robert Kennedy Jr, an environmental lawyer, is running against Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary and has drawn big and enthusiastic crowds and polled as high as 20%.
But the Congressional Integrity Project’s document argues that Kennedy’s recent comments about Jewish and Chinese people, which were quickly hailed by neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers as “100% correct”, were not an aberration but fitted a long pattern.
Earlier this summer Kennedy touted a meeting with Ice Cube, a rapper who issued bizarre antisemitic tweets, and publicly defended musician Roger Waters, who was embroiled in controversy after donning a costume intended to evoke Nazi attire at a concert in Germany.
The report says Kennedy has also repeatedly promoted and praised fringe online broadcaster James Corbett, a Sandy Hook and 9/11 conspiracy theorist who has claimed that “Hitler and the Nazis were 100% completely and utterly set up”.
Kennedy has often allied himself with National of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who regularly unleashed tirades about alleged Jewish control of media and government. Kennedy met Farrakhan at his Chicago home in 2015, with Farrakhan later tweeting that they discussed “a vaccine that is designed to affect Black males”.
The Project details how Kennedy himself has frequently invoked Nazi Germany when pushing debunked theories about vaccines. He put out a video that showed infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci with a mustache reminiscent of Adolf Hitler and used the word “holocaust” to describe children he believes were hurt by vaccines in 2015.
Last year, at a Washington rally organized by his group Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy complained that people’s rights were being violated by public health measures that had been taken to reduce the number of people sickened and killed by Covid-19. He said:
Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.
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Robert Kennedy Jr, a long-shot Democratic candidate for US president, has a long history of racism, antisemitism and xenophobia, and should be denied a national platform, according to a damning report seen by the Guardian.
Kennedy, who provoked anger last week when he was filmed falsely suggesting that the coronavirus could have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, is due to testify at the US Capitol in Washington on Thursday.
The Congressional Integrity Project, a political watchdog, called for Republicans to disinvite Kennedy after releasing a report that details his meetings with and promotion of racists, antisemites and extremist conspiracy theorists.
“Kennedy embraces virtually every conspiracy theory in existence,” the report states.
His horrific antisemitic and xenophobic views are simply beyond the pale, and he has frequently met with and promoted antisemitic conspiracy theorists. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine conspiracies go back decades and have had deadly real world consequences.
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Robert Kennedy Jr's Covid remarks 'put lives in danger', warns sister
Good morning, US politics blog readers. The youngest sister of Democratic presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy Jr has joined other members of the Kennedy family in denouncing his claim that Covid-19 was engineered to target some ethnic groups and spare others.
In a video published over the weekend, Kennedy Jr was heard saying the virus was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” while at a recent dinner in New York City. His remarks, also alleging development by China of viruses as a bioweapon, drew accusations of racism and antisemitism and were widely condemned by Kennedy’s relatives and across the Democratic party.
Rory Kennedy, the youngest child of the late Robert F Kennedy and a documentary film-maker, told the Guardian on Thursday:
My feelings about my brother Bobby’s recent statement regarding Covid and ethnic targeting are very much aligned with my brother Joe, sister Kerry, and nephew Joe III – all of whom I admire for speaking out against him.
There is a great deal of hate in the world and remarks like Bobby’s only serve to fuel that hate. Such conspiracy mongering not only creates more divisiveness, it actually puts people’s lives in danger.
Her remarks came after her sister, Kerry Kennedy, described their brother’s comments as “deplorable and untruthful”, adding:
His statements do not represent what I believe or what Robert F Kennedy Human Rights stands for, with our 50+ year track record of protecting rights and standing against racism and all forms of discrimination.
Her rebuke was echoed by the Democratic former Massachusetts congressman Joe Kennedy III, nephew of Robert Kennedy Jr, who said his uncle’s comments were “hurtful and wrong”.
Close Kennedy family members weighing in reflects the growing outrage at the words of the businessman who is challenging Joe Biden for next year’s Democratic presidential nomination.
Here’s what else we’re watching today:
A federal judge is set to hear a challenge to an asylum rule that is a key part of the Biden administration’s immigration policy.
Two IRS whistleblowers who claim the justice department improperly interfered with the years-long investigation into Hunter Biden will testify in front of the House oversight committee.
9am: The House will meet before recessing. It will later take up bills condemning the use of schools as migrant shelters and reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
11am: Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, will address Congress.
1pm. White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre will hold a briefing.
3pm: Joe Biden will lead a competition council meeting with an announcement of new administration actions to bolster economic competition.
4pm: Senator Lindsey Graham will hold a news conference on “supreme court integrity”.
6pm: The Bidens will host the White House congressional picnic on the South Lawn, with the vice-president, Kamala Harris, attending.
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