America is “staring down the barrel of martial law” as it approaches the presidential election, a US senator from Oregon has warned as Donald Trump cracks down on protests in Portland, the state’s biggest city.
Related: This is what happens when the War on Terror is turned inward, on America | Hamilton Nolan
Continue reading...The White House fired back at John Bolton on Sunday, seeking to rubbish a key claim in the former national security adviser’s bombshell new book, that Donald Trump asked Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, for help in winning re-election.
Related: Trump's Berman-SDNY disaster suggests William Barr is not so smart after all | Lloyd Green
Continue reading...Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions’ playground fight continued into Sunday. In an interview with Sinclair TV, Trump said Sessions had not been “mentally qualified” to be his first attorney general.
Related: Jeff Sessions snaps back after Trump tells Alabama not to trust him
Continue reading...The electoral map does not favor Republicans and the pandemic has helped put them on defense in states they once thought safe
Just three months ago, centrist Democrats were panicking. After strong performances in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders appeared poised to sail away with the nomination for president. Some in the party feared the self-identified democratic socialist would wreak havoc down the ballot.
Related: Could Susan Collins' vote for Kavanaugh help the Democrats flip the Senate in 2020?
Continue reading...Burr’s cellphone seized overnight in inquiry into claims he used private coronavirus briefing to sell stocks before market plunge
A Republican US senator stepped down from a key committee leadership role in Congress on Thursday after his phone was seized overnight by investigators with a warrant looking into allegations that he used private briefings as inside information to dump shares before the market plummeted over the coronavirus crisis.
Related: Republican senator urged to quit after report he sold stocks before Covid-19 market plunge
Continue reading...The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has said Barack Obama should have 'kept his mouth shut' instead of criticising Donald Trump, and called his intervention 'classless'. McConnell was speaking to Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump in an online fundraiser on Monday night
Continue reading...John Ratcliffe was forced to withdraw his nomination for the same post nine months ago for exaggerating his security experience
A Trump loyalist nominated as director of national intelligence (DNI) looked set to sail through Senate confirmation hearings on Tuesday, only nine months after being forced to withdraw for having exaggerated his security experience.
Related: John Ratcliffe: Trump's intelligence chief pick withdraws amid qualification doubts
Continue reading...The US president said the government's top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, would not testify in the House of Representatives but only before the Senate. He argued this was because 'the House is a set-up. The House is a bunch of Trump haters.'
He later said the US 'wants' and 'needs' to reopen amid the coronavirus outbreak
Senate secretary said legal counsel advised that ‘the secretary has no discretion to disclose any such information’
The US Senate has rejected a request from Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, to search for and release any records of a 1993 complaint against him from an aide who has accused him of sexual assault.
The former vice-president gave his first TV interview on the matter on Friday, flatly denying former aide Tara Reade’s allegation that when he was a senator from Delaware he pushed her against a wall and assaulted her.
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America’s addiction to mass incarceration could almost double its number of deaths from coronavirus, with jails acting as incubators of the disease and spreading a further 100,000 fatalities across the US.
The startling warning comes from groundbreaking modeling by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and academic researchers, released on Wednesday.
Related: Mass incarceration could add 100,000 deaths to US coronavirus toll, study finds
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The Guardian’s Vivian Ho reports:
California’s homeless census was already troubled. Covid-19 is making it impossible.
Related: California's homeless census was already troubled. Covid-19 is making it impossible
Continue reading...The former Democratic Illinois governor called himself a ‘Trumpocrat’ as he thanked Donald Trump for commuting his prison sentence, praising Trump’s ‘kind heart’. Blagojevich had been recorded trying to sell the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama when he became president, but Trump has claimed it did not happen
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A judge has temporarily blocked Microsoft’s cloud-computing work with the Pentagon after Amazon complained that it lost the contract partly because of Trump’s bias against the company.
Trump has repeatedly lashed out against Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and owner of the Washington Post.
A judge ordered Thursday a temporary block on the JEDI cloud contract, which was awarded to Microsoft, in response to a suit filed by Amazon. Shares of Microsoft fell on the news, while Amazon’s stock rose slightly.
A court notice announcing the injunction was filed on Thursday, but wasn’t public. It’s unclear why the documents were sealed.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is instructed to earmark $42 million for any ‘costs and damages’ that could be incurred in the event that the ‘injunction was issued wrongfully,’ the filing states. Amazon must file a notice with the courts indicating it has obtained the $42 million by Feb. 20. Microsoft and Amazon must respond to the filing by Feb. 27.
The eight Republicans who supported the Iran War Powers resolution in the Senate were: Todd Young, Mike Lee, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Rand Paul, Bill Cassidy, Jerry Moran and Lamar Alexander.
The resolution, aimed at limiting Trump’s authority to launch military operations in Iran, was expected to attract some Republican support, but the number of defections was surprising.
Continue reading...The president of the United States was greeted by applause for his State of the Union address where he painted a picture of his vision of the future of the US on Tuesday. The following day, Trump was acquitted of impeachment in the Senate with all but one Republican voting in his favour.
On Thursday, Trump held a speech he called a 'celebration'. A Gallup poll has put Trump’s approval rating at 49%, the highest level for that survey since 2017. And on top of that, the Democratic primary race got off to a slow and embarrassing start in Iowa after technical difficulties delayed results by almost 24 hours
Donald Trump spoke in the White House to supporters and Republicans in what he called 'a celebration' on Thursday, after being acquitted of impeachment in the Senate.
The senators found Trump not guilty of the first article of impeachment, abuse of power, by a 52-48 tally, and not guilty of the second article of impeachment, obstruction of Congress, by a 53-47 tally.
Trump said the Democrats that impeached him were 'vicious and mean' saying Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi were 'horrible' people
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that Donald Trump would never get rid of the 'scar' of impeachment, in her first weekly press conference since Trump was acquitted by the Senate.
Pelosi also responded to Trump’s comments at the National Prayer Breakfast, where he implicitly insulted Pelosi and Republican senator Mitt Romney
Continue reading...The hollowness of the president’s acquittal after impeachment may be exposed as leaks and investigations soldier on
The Senate trial of Donald Trump has arrived at its preordained conclusion. The president has begun a victory lap to celebrate impunity and settle scores with a long list of enemies headed by Mitt Romney, while the Democrats return to their ill-starred primaries. But there are good reasons to believe that Ukraine, the reluctant focus of the impeachment battle, will continue to haunt US politics for some time to come.
Related: Trump tilts at Romney and Pelosi in first speech after impeachment acquittal – live
Continue reading...How did Trump and his team pull off his successful defense? Here’s a look at key factors
Will historians find Donald Trump’s impeachment remarkable because Republican politicians turned a blind eye to such egregious wrongdoing and acquitted him? Or will they find it remarkable because it was the last time a cadre of Republican officials publicly turned against Trump?
While most of the career civil servants who defied the president by testifying in the impeachment inquiry do not publicly identify as Republican, many were Trump appointees with strong Republican ties, while other key figures such as former national security adviser John Bolton are wizened party warriors.
Continue reading...President becomes third in US history to be impeached by the House and acquitted in Senate trial
Donald Trump has been acquitted in his Senate trial on both of the articles of impeachment he faced, ending the threat that he would be removed from office and concluding the impeachment process.
Voting largely along party lines, the senators found Trump not guilty of the first article of impeachment, abuse of power, by a 52-48 tally, and not guilty of the second article of impeachment, obstruction of Congress, by a 53-47 tally.
Continue reading...Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell called for senators to ‘vote to reject the House abuse of power’ during a speech on Tuesday 4 February before a final vote scheduled for Wednesday afternoon on whether to convict Donald Trump. Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer said that ‘the Republicans refused to get the evidence because they were afraid of what it would show’.
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