Category Archives: Republicans

Nuclear secrets reportedly found at Mar-a-Lago are ‘gamechanger’, experts say – as it happened

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Report appears to confirm security officials’ worst fears about the nature of the material Trump refused to hand back

Former Trump administration defense secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark Esper have joined a group of retired military officers who have written an open letter warning of an “extremely adverse environment” for the military – a thinly-veiled attack on the former president’s efforts to use servicemen and women to advance his political goals.

“Military officers swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not an oath of fealty to an individual or to an office,” the letter, published by the online security analysis website War on the Rocks, states.

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Trump’s Mar-a-Lago legal victory starts search for special master – live updates

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US midterms campaigns kick into high gear after Labor Day as Senate returns from month-long break

Legal pressure on Jeffrey Clark, the former justice department lawyer who schemed with Donald Trump and others to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia and other states, is expected to rise with the cooperation of another ex-DoJ lawyer who worked with him, say former prosecutors.

The cooperation from the ex-lawyer, in tandem with other evidence obtained by prosecutors, could help spur charges against Clark – a close ally of then president Trump – and benefit prosecutors as they go after bigger targets.

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Could unexpected Democratic gains foil a midterm Republican victory?

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A string of favorable outcomes for the party, coupled with backlash from supreme court’s abortion ban, could galvanize Biden supporters

Joe Biden travels to the battleground states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania on Monday, determined to reframe America’s midterm elections as a defining choice between democracy and the extremism of Donald Trump.

Fighting for every vote, the US president will mark Labor Day with growing confidence as opinion polls suggest that, while Republicans still have the lead, Democrats now have the momentum heading into the home stretch.

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Trump calls FBI, DoJ ‘vicious monsters’ in first rally since Mar-a-Lago search

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Former president also calls Joe Biden’s Philadelphia address the ‘most vicious, hateful, divisive speech’

Speaking in Pennsylvania on Saturday, at his first rally since the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago for top-secret material taken from the White House and since Joe Biden used a primetime address to warn that Republicans were assaulting US democracy, Donald Trump lashed out.

The former president said: “The FBI and the justice department have become vicious monsters, controlled by radical-left scoundrels, lawyers and the media, who tell them what to do.”

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Biden targets Trump and says ‘anyone who fails to condemn violence is a threat to democracy’ – live

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Biden speaks at White House and takes swipe at former president, but says not all Trump supporters are threat to America

At the White House press briefing just now, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre spoke on Joe Biden’s speech last night where he warned that Donald Trump and “MAGA Republicans” are a threat to democracy.

“The president was trying to give the American people a choice: how do we move forward in this inflection point?” Jean-Pierre said. “When it comes to the soul of the nation, that is something the president has talked about for years… He has been concerned about where our democracy is going.”

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Five key takeaways from Biden’s speech on the threat to democracy

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In a rare primetime address, Biden pitched the midterms as a battle for the nation’s soul and directly called out Trump

Joe Biden – who usually makes couched references to “the former guy” and his “predecessor” – explicitly named and called out Donald Trump during his speech. The president warned that Trump and the “Maga (Make America great again)” Republicans “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundation of our republic”.

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Biden’s stern warning on extremism shows the rose-colored glasses are off

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The president’s primetime speech named Trump and ‘Maga Republicans’ as a threat facing American democracy

Joe Biden’s journey from idealist to realist continues. But it is not quite complete.

After 36 years in the Senate, he stepped into the US presidency in 2021 as an apostle of bipartisanship, convinced that his authoritarian-minded predecessor Donald Trump would fade away and the Republican party would rediscover its bearings.

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Biden speech: ‘Democracy is under assault’ from election deniers and political violence, president warns – as it happened

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The president called out Maga forces as a threat ‘to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the very soul of this country’

Protesters outside Independence Hall were shouting “Let’s go, Brandon,” which Biden was able to brush off.

Biden addressed them, saying: “They’re entitled to be outrageous. This is a democracy.”

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Sarah Palin loses Alaska special election to Democrat Mary Peltola

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Peltola’s victory in the state’s first ranked choice voting election makes her the first Alaska Native to serve in the House

The Democrat Mary Peltola has won the special election for Alaska’s only US House seat, besting a field that included the Republican Sarah Palin, who was seeking a political comeback in the state where she was once governor.

Peltola, who is Yup’ik and turned 49 on Wednesday, will become the first Alaska Native to serve in the House and the first woman to hold the seat. She will serve the remaining months of the late Republican US Representative Don Young’s term. Young held the seat for 49 years before his death in March.

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Trump ‘knowingly put national security at risk’ by stashing classified documents, Schiff says – as it happened

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In overnight court filing, DoJ says it was ‘likely’ efforts had been made to move and hide documents

Donald Trump’s former White House counselor, Kellyanne Conway, does not think Republicans should move on from her former boss, despite signs his control of the party could cost it the chance to take Congress in November.

Speaking to Fox News on Tuesday, Conway said: “Those who want to move on from Trump: You go first.”

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Biden ‘determined to ban assault weapons’ as he lays out crime prevention plans – as it happened

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President details his Safer America Plan in Pennsylvania speech and says funding police provides ‘peace of mind’

The White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is holding a gaggle aboard Air Force One, as Joe Biden heads to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to talk about gun safety.

The first topic in the gaggle is the flooding in Mississippi and the failure of the Jackson area water treatment services, which has caused a crisis over clean drinking water.

US Secret Service official Tony Ornato, a figure of intense interest to the congressional committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack, has retired from the agency. He was an eyewitness to some of the most critical incidents involving Donald Trump in the hours leading up to the deadly assault on the US Capitol.

NBC News reported that Trump has hired a criminal attorney who was once Florida’s solicitor to his legal team. Chris Kise is expected to make his first appearance in federal court in West Palm Beach on Thursday when district judge Aileen Cannon mulls Trump’s request for a special master to oversee the justice department’s review of classified materials seized by the FBI at his home.

We’re awaiting at any moment the justice department’s legal response to Trump’s request, which will be a lengthy filing running up to 40 pages after Cannon waived a 20-page limit imposed by the court.

Incumbent Democratic Arizona senator Mark Kelly leads Republican challenger Blake Masters by more than three points in a poll released today, appearing to confirm a growing belief within the party that pro-choice messaging on abortion will be vote-winner in November’s midterms.

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Critics denounce Lindsey Graham for warning of ‘riots in the street’ if Trump indicted – as it happened

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Justice department faces deadline for detailed inventory of files while ex-president’s team must argue for review by special master

More from Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe on the legal case around the FBI search and seizure of classified documents from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club-resort and home.

Tribe v Oz

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Kinzinger: Republicans ‘hypocritical’ for defending Trump over taking classified material

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Party spent years chanting ‘lock her up’ at Hillary Clinton for private email system, says congressman, a vocal critic of Trump

Congressman Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican who has been one of the most vocal critics of Donald Trump, called out his party for criticizing Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while continuing to defend the former president’s decision to take sensitive government information to his home at Mar-a-Lago.

Kinzinger’s comments came days after the FBI released a redacted version of the affidavit the agency submitted to a federal judge to justify a search of Trump’s home. The document details how Trump retained classified material at Mar-a-Lago and that the government had been working for more than a year to retrieve those materials. A batch of documents returned earlier this year contained 184 documents marked as classified, including 25 marked as top secret.

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Trump search affidavit reveals potential for ‘evidence of obstruction’ at Mar-a-Lago – live

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Heavily redacted document also says several documents contained what appears to be Trump’s handwritten notes

Three new sealed filings have appeared online in the federal court system related to the Mar-a-Lago case, Politico reports:

Since they are not public, it’s unclear what they are, but a federal magistrate judge gave the justice department until noon eastern time today to make the redacted affidavit justifying the search public.

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Student loan forgiveness: Biden to outline $10,000 debt relief plan – live

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President had campaigned on promise of loan forgiveness of up to $10,000 for those struggling with student debt
• Trump appears to concede he illegally retained official documents in filing

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The GOP is teeing up their counter-attack to Biden’s impending announcement on student debt relief, decrying it as a “bribe” that will be paid for by American taxpayers.

Here’s what the Senate Republicans said on Twitter:

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Democrats’ hopes rise for midterms amid backlash over abortion access

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Democrat Pat Ryan made abortion central to his campaign, and defeated Republican Mark Molinaro in contested House election

After months of bracing for staggering losses, Democrats are suddenly filled with a sense of optimism that the 2022 midterm elections could defy historical precedent and see them perform strongly, especially by highlighting the Republican threat to abortion rights.

On Tuesday night, Democrat Pat Ryan defeated Republican Mark Molinaro in a fiercely contested special House election in New York’s Hudson Valley, in a contest that was seen as a barometer of impact of the US supreme court’s decision to end the constitutional right to an abortion.

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Florida: Charlie Crist wins Democratic primary to challenge Ron DeSantis

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Former Republican governor who became a Democratic congressman edges out Nikki Fried to face the Donald Trump protégé in November

Charlie Crist will challenge Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, in November after trouncing Nikki Fried, the state agriculture commissioner, in Tuesday’s Democratic primary.

Crist, a former Republican governor of Florida who switched parties and became a Democratic congressman, fought a campaign touting his experience in office and opposition to the 15-week abortion ban signed by DeSantis.

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Dr Oz campaign draws ire over unsavory remarks on Democratic rival’s stroke

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The Republican candidate’s aide said John Fetterman would not have suffered had he ‘ever eaten a vegetable in his life’

John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for US Senate in Pennsylvania, might not have had a stroke if he “had ever eaten a vegetable in his life”, an aide to the Republican candidate, Mehmet Oz, said on Tuesday in a strikingly nasty moment in an already bitter contest.

The statement, to Business Insider, came in response to Fetterman’s mockery of a video in which Oz complains about the price of crudités while mangling the names of two Pennsylvania grocery stores.

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Donald Trump reportedly kept hundreds of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago – as it happened

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Florida and New York go to the polls as Democrats seek to defend their congressional majority in November

In other Florida news, voters are casting primary ballots as Democrats look ahead to November, where they’ll mount a challenge to governor and potential Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. Joan E Greve has the latest on what to expect from today’s polls:

Florida voters will head to the polls on Tuesday to determine which candidates will have the chance to face off in this November’s general election. Voters will cast ballots in races for the governorship and Congress, all the way down to circuit courts and local school boards.

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Colorado Republican turns Democrat over ‘existential threat’ from GOP

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In letter announcing defection, state senator Kevin Priola cites political and environmental threat from his erstwhile party

Announcing his switch to the Democrats, a Colorado state senator said Republican attacks on democracy were not the only “existential threat” posed by his former party.

“I have become increasingly worried about our planet and the climate crisis we are facing,” Kevin Priola said, in a letter posted to social media on Monday.

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