Closing summary
Here’s a recap of today’s developments:
Donald Trump entered pleas of not guilty to new charges federal prosecutors brought against him last week in the case of the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago. The former president did not appear in court on Friday, just a day after he pleaded not guilty in a Washington federal courtroom to federal charges over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Donald Trump called on the supreme court to intercede in the legal battles he is facing. In a Truth Social post, he claimed President Joe Biden “hit me with a barrage of weak lawsuits” that will “require massive amounts of my time [and] money to adjudicate”, resources that he claimed would have been used for advertising and rallies.
A group of House Democrats called on the body overseeing federal courts to allow Donald Trump’s election fraud trial be publicly televised live. Trump’s arraignment in Washington courtroom on Thursday was not televised publicly, as cameras are generally not allowed in federal courtrooms. His next court hearing in the case is set for 28 August.
All signs point to Donald Trump soon being indicted for the fourth time this year by Fani Willis, the district attorney in Georgia’s Fulton county, who has been investigating his efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s election win in the state three years ago. But the former president’s attorneys have been fighting the inquiry, including by filing two motions attempting to get Willis, a Democrat, thrown off the case.
Despite his mounting legal problems, Donald Trump continued to consolidate his support among Republicans. The Republican presidential candidate frontrunner announced endorsements from almost the entirety of Alabama’s congressional lawmakers, including all the Republicans in its House delegation.
Nearly of half of Republicans said they would not vote for Donald Trump if he were convicted of a felony, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll. About two-thirds of Republicans said the accusation in Trump’s latest indictment that he solicited election fraud was “not believable”, compared with 29% who said it was.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis appeared to finally reject Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election, according to a New York Times report. DeSantis has previously been vague about whether he adhered to Trump’s disproven claims that fraud caused him to lose re-election, though DeSantis has characterized the state and federal charges filed against the former president as politically motivated.
Ex-national security adviser John Bolton issued harsh remarks against his former boss and the leading 2024 Republican presidential candidate, saying that the US will likely withdraw from Nato if Donald Trump wins the election.
Senate Democrats have asked supreme court chief justice John Roberts to ensure that Samuel Alito recuses himself from cases involving the panel’s ethics, citing comments he made in a recent interview. The comments from Alito, one of the most prominent of the six conservative justices who form a majority block on the court, came after the judiciary committee approved legislation that would require the court to adopt an ethics code, in response to media reports recently that showed ties between the justices and parties with interests in their decisions.
Liberal justice Elena Kagan weighed in on the matter on Thursday, saying that Congress does indeed have the authority to regulate the court, though stopped short of outright endorsing a code of conduct. Kagan told the audiences of judges and lawyers in Portland, Oregon: “It just can’t be that the court is the only institution that somehow is not subject to checks and balances from anybody else. We’re not imperial.”
Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie visited Ukraine on Friday and met with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in an attempt to underscore US support for Kyiv by one of the people bidding to be the next Republican president of the US.
Newly released tax and election records show that since 2020 controversial financier Thomas Klingenstein has become one of the largest individual donors to national Republicans, contributing more than $11.6m to candidates and Pac, after decades as the far-right Claremont Institute’s biggest donor and board chairman.
In John Bolton’s op-ed published on Tuesday, he said Donald Trump “disdains knowledge” and accused him of “seeing relations between the United States and foreign lands, especially our adversaries, predominantly as matters of personality”.
“Foreign leaders, friend or foe, are far more likely see him as ignorant, inexperienced, braggadocious, longing to be one of the big boys and eminently susceptible to flattery,” Bolton wrote. “These characteristics were a constant source of risk in Trump’s first term, and would be again in a second term.”
Bolton condemned Trump for his decision-making, saying:
Beyond acting on inadequate information, reflection or discussion, Trump is also feckless even after making decisions. When things go wrong, or when he simply changes his mind subsequently (a common occurrence), he invariably tries to distance himself from his own decision, fearing negative media coverage or political criticism.
Following his firing in 2019, Bolton published a book, The Room Where It Happened, in which he strongly criticized Trump’s leadership. Earlier this year, Bolton called Trump’s 2024 presidential bid “poison” to the Republican party.
Ex-national security adviser John Bolton issued harsh remarks against his former boss and the leading 2024 Republican presidential candidate, saying that the US will likely withdraw from Nato if Donald Trump wins the election.
In an interview with the Hill on Thursday, Bolton criticized the former president’s foreign policy after an op-ed he wrote earlier this week called Trump’s behavior “erratic, irrational and unconstrained”.
“Donald Trump doesn’t really have a philosophy, as we understand it in political terms,” Bolton said.
He doesn’t think in policy directions when he makes decisions, certainly in the national security space.
Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019, also lambasted Trump for his foreign policy legacy with regard to the alliance, saying in the interview:
He threatened the existence of Nato, and I think in a second Trump term, we’d almost certainly withdraw from Nato.
He also criticized Republicans who have praised Trump for his foreign policy positions. He said:
Those who make these claims about what Trump did in his first term don’t really understand how we got to the places we did. Because many of the things they now give Trump credit for, he wanted to go in the opposite direction.
Nearly half of Republicans would not vote for Trump if convicted - poll
Nearly of half of Republicans said they would not vote for Donald Trump if he were convicted of a felony, according to a new poll.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted before the former president’s court appearance on Thursday, asked respondents if they would vote for Trump for president next year if he were “convicted of a felony crime by a jury”.
Among Republicans, 45% said they would not vote for him, while 35% said they would. The rest said they did not know.
Asked if they would vote for Trump if he were “currently serving time in prison”, 52% of Republicans said they would not, and 28% said they would.
About two-thirds of Republicans said the accusation in Trump’s latest indictment that he solicited election fraud was “not believable”, compared with 29% who said it was.
Updated
Heidi Beirich, co-founder and chief strategy officer at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told the Guardian in a telephone conversation that Thomas Klingenstein’s pivot may indicate an effort to “pull of Republican outfits and donors towards more extreme positions”.
While the Claremont Institute has been called “the nerve center of the American Right” for its intellectual leadership and formation of hard right activists, Klingenstein appears to have a new appetite for directly impacting electoral politics.
Klingenstein is a partner in Wall Street investment firm Cohen Klingenstein, which administers a portfolio worth more than $2.3bn, according to its most recent Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings.
Klingenstein’s grandfather was a successful investor, and other members of his family pursue more conventional avenues for their philanthropy, but beginning in the Donald Trump era, Klingenstein has increasingly used his resources to pursue a hard-edged version of rightwing politics.
Klingenstein’s characterization of the political divide as a cold civil war – spelled out in a series of glossy YouTube videos – has been previously reported, as have some of his activities as chair of the rightwing Claremont Institute, a Claremont, California-based thinktank.
That organization charted a radical, pro-Trump course from 2016, culminating in Senior Fellow John Eastman advising Trump in his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and delivering a fiery speech to the crowd of protesters in Washington DC on 6 January 2021.
But newly available filings reveal how he has advanced these ideas in electoral and cultural battles.
Newly released tax and election records show that since 2020 controversial financier Thomas Klingenstein has become one of the largest individual donors to national Republicans, contributing more than $11.6m to candidates and Pac, after decades as the far-right Claremont Institute’s biggest donor and board chairman.
The spending spree dwarfs the total $666,000 Klingenstein spent between 1992 and 2016, and in the last election cycle put Klingenstein in the top 40 contributors to national Republican candidates and committees.
In turn the spending has allowed him to connect with a long-standing network of conservative mega-donors centered on the billionaire-founded Club for Growth, which advocates for the reduction of government.
Klingenstein and the Claremont Institute push a harder-edged rightwing politics, and he appeared in a series of videos released in 2022 where he argued that American conservatives are in a “cold civil war” with “woke communists”, and that “education, corporate media, entertainment, big business, big tech… together with the government function as a totalitarian regime”.
A group of House Democrats called on the body overseeing federal courts to allow Donald Trump’s election fraud trial be publicly televised live.
In a letter led by Representative Adam Schiff, who served on the House select committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection, the group of 38 House Democrats asked that the judicial conference “explicitly authorize the broadcasting of court proceedings in the cases of United States of America v. Donald J. Trump”.
The group wrote:
It is imperative the [court] ensures timely access to accurate and reliable information surrounding these cases and all of their proceedings, given the extraordinary national importance to our democratic institutions and need for transparency.
Trump was arraigned at a federal courthouse in Washington on Thursday and charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights.
The arraignment was not televised publicly, as cameras are generally not allowed in federal courtrooms. Trump’s next court hearing in the case is set for 28 August.
The letter’s signatories included other members who served on the January 6 committee which concluded with a recommendation that the justice department pursue a criminal investigation of Trump over his involvement in the insurrection.
It continued:
Given the historic nature of the charges brought forth in these cases, it is hard to imagine a more powerful circumstance for televised proceedings. If the public is to fully accept the outcome, it will be vitally important for it to witness, as directly as possible, how the trials are conducted, the strength of the evidence adduced and the credibility of witnesses.
As we reported earlier, Donald Trump pleaded not guilty on Friday to new charges brought against him by special counsel Jack Smith in his classified documents criminal case.
Trump, who just a day ago pleaded not guilty in a Washington federal courtroom to federal charges over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, officially entered a plea of “not guilty” to the 40-count superseding indictment in a separate case against him in the Southern District of Florida.
The former president did not appear in court on Friday. He also waived his right to be present in court for his arraignment on the three additional charges, scheduled for Thursday 10 August before a US magistrate judge in Fort Pierce, Florida.
Federal prosecutors filed the new charges last week against Trump and two of his employees, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, in the criminal case over the retention of sensitive government records at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Trump now faces 40 charges in the case, after originally being indicted on 37 counts last month.
Trump’s co-defendants, De Oliveira and Nauta, have not indicated in court filings their plans for the arraignment, according to CNN.
After months of waffling, Florida governor Ron DeSantis appeared to finally reject Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election, the New York Times reports.
“All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true,” DeSantis said in response to a question from a reporter during a campaign stop in Iowa, a day after Trump appeared in a Washington DC federal court to answer charges related to his failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
The governor has previously been vague about whether he adhered to Trump’s disproven claims that fraud caused him to lose re-election, though DeSantis has characterized the state and federal charges filed against the former president as politically motivated.
The comments come amid a pronounced drop in DeSantis’s recent poll numbers, who is otherwise in second place to Trump among Republican primary voters.
Trump pleads not guilty to new charges in Mar-a-Lago documents case
Donald Trump has entered pleas of not guilty to new charges federal prosecutors brought against him last week in the case of the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago, CNN reports:
Donald Trump has pleaded not guilty for the second time in 24 hours, this time for the additional charges leveled against him in the documents case. He waives his right to appear for the arraignment on those charges, per a new court filing.
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) August 4, 2023
Special counsel Jack Smith last week added charges to the indictment against Trump claiming he tried to erase surveillance footage that prosecutors subpoenaed, which showed boxes of classified documents being removed from a storage room at his South Florida resort. Smith also indicted property manager Carlos De Oliveira, who allegedly worked with Trump to destroy the footage.
De Oliveira made an initial court appearance this week, but did not enter a plea as he was still looking for a lawyer to represent him in Florida.
Iowa is the first state to vote in the Republican presidential nomination process, and New York Times/Siena College polling of the state released today shows Donald Trump with a commanding lead:
Donald Trump is dominating Ron DeSantis and other rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, the first Times/Siena poll of 2024 shows. https://t.co/dkgktil7UY
— NYT Politics (@nytpolitics) July 31, 2023
However, he’s underperforming his national poll numbers in Iowa, potentially giving rivals like Ron DeSantis an opening to catch up. From the Times’s story on the data:
Even Iowa Republicans who say they favor other candidates could still swing Mr. Trump’s way.
“Each indictment gets me leaning toward Trump,” said John-Charles Fish, 45, a Waukon, Iowa, social media consultant who said he still supported Mr. DeSantis, but barely. “It wouldn’t take much for me to change my mind,” he said.
For Mr. DeSantis and other competitors, the Iowa survey yielded glimmers of bright spots. About 47 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters said they would consider other candidates. Among Republicans with at least a college degree, Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis are tied at 26 percent when the whole field is under consideration.
In a head-to-head match between the front-runner and his closest rival, Mr. Trump leads Iowa handily, 55 percent to 39 percent, but he is well behind Mr. DeSantis among college-educated Republicans, 38 percent to 53 percent.
According to the poll, Mr. DeSantis is seen as the more moral candidate, and although the Florida governor has been knocked for some awkward moments on the campaign trail, he is seen as considerably more likable than Mr. Trump. More than half of those surveyed said the term “likable” was a better fit for Mr. DeSantis, compared with 38 percent for Mr. Trump.
The poll also suggests that Mr. DeSantis’s argument that he is the more electable Republican may be resonating with voters, at least in Iowa. Just under half of those surveyed said Mr. Trump is the candidate more able to beat Mr. Biden, while 40 percent said Mr. DeSantis is. Nationally, Mr. Trump holds a 30-percentage-point lead on the same question.
Robert Corry, a business consultant in Grinnell, Iowa, praised Mr. DeSantis’s stewardship of Florida’s sprawling economy, his ability to “get things done” and his “exemplary, outstanding life.”
Donald Trump continues to consolidate his support among Republicans, criminal charges be damned.
He just announced endorsements from almost the entirety of Alabama’s congressional lawmakers, including all the Republicans in its House delegation. Perhaps what is more notable is who from the deeply red state did not endorse him.
While Trump picked up the support of Republican senior senator Tommy Tuberville, junior senator Katie Britt has reportedly said she will not be endorsing any candidate for the GOP’s nomination. Republican governor Kay Ivey also has not made an endorsement, though the former president did gain the support of lieutenant governor Will Ainsworth.
And needless to say, the sole Democrat in Alabama’s House delegation, Terri Sewell, did not endorse Trump.
Donald Trump’s detractors have long dreamed of seeing him behind bars, and now that he’s the subject of not one, not two, but three and perhaps even four criminal indictments, it seems like that dream could become a reality.
Or could it?
The Washington Post has a story looking at the practical considerations that would determine whether Trump actually goes to jail if convicted of the state and federal charges he currently stands accused of. That would be an unprecedented situation, and some former government officials the Post spoke to were skeptical of the former president ever actually ending up behind bars:
Could Trump face prison? “Theoretically, yes and practically, no,” said Chuck Rosenberg, a former top federal prosecutor and counsel to then-FBI Director James B. Comey. Rosenberg served briefly as head of the Drug Enforcement Administration in the Trump administration and notably said the president had “condoned police misconduct” in remarking to officers in Long Island that they need not protect suspects’ heads when loading them into police vehicles.
“Any federal district judge ought to understand it raises enormous and unprecedented logistical issues,” Rosenberg said of the prospect Trump could be incarcerated. “Probation, fines, community service and home confinement are all alternatives.”
And even if he is convicted, there are a range of possibilities for the type of sentence he could receive:
The prospect of potentially decades in prison for Trump is politically loaded, though the charges he faces could carry such a penalty. After entering a not-guilty plea in Miami federal court on June 13, Trump claimed he was being threatened with “400 years in prison,” adding up the statutory maximum penalty for the 37 counts against him. The charges he faces in D.C. related to his alleged efforts to stay in power despite losing the election could add additional decades, based on that math.
Judges almost never apply maximum penalties to first offenders and rarely stack sentences rather than let them run concurrently. However, federal sentencing guidelines are highly technical. Specialists estimate that a first offender convicted of multiple counts of willfully retaining national defense information and obstructing or conspiring to obstruct an investigation by concealing evidence might face a range of anything from 51 to 63 months on the low end — about five years — to 17½ to 22 years on the high end — or about 20 years, given Trump’s alleged leadership role and abuse of trust.
Similarly, Jan. 6 riot defendants convicted at trial of two of the same counts with which Trump is charged — conspiring to or actually obstructing an official proceeding — have faced sentencing guideline ranges as high as seven to 11 years, and as low as less than two years.
But judges always have the final say.
“Without question, if it were anyone else [but Trump], prison would be a certainty,” said Thomas A. Durkin, a former federal prosecutor who teaches national security law at Loyola University Chicago. However, he said, “The Secret Service waiver issue is a novel and complex issue” that could theoretically factor into an exception.
That said, if he does go to prison, the Post reports that it could actually things easier for his Secret Service details:
Former and current Secret Service agents said that while there is no precedent, they feel certain the agency would insist on providing some form of 24/7 protection to an imprisoned former president. And, they say, the agency is probably planning for that possibility, seeking to match to some degree its normal practice of rotating three daily shifts of at least one or two agents providing close proximity protection.
“This question keeps getting raised, yet no official answers” from the Secret Service, said Jonathan Wackrow, a former Secret Service agent and now chief operating officer for Teneo Risk, a corporate advisory and communications firm. “However, we can infer how security measures could be implemented based on existing protective protocols. Unless there are changes in legislation or the former president waives protection, the U.S. Secret Service would likely maintain a protective environment around the president in accordance with their current practices.”
Current and former agents said Trump’s detail would coordinate their protection work with the Federal Bureau of Prisons to ensure there was no conflict about duties or about how they would handle emergencies, as well as the former president’s routine movements in a prison — such as heading to exercise or meals. The Secret Service, they said, would maintain a bubble around Trump in any case, keeping him at a distance from other inmates.
“In some ways, protection may be easier — the absence of travel means logistics get easier and confinement means that the former president’s location is always known,” Wackrow said. “Theoretically, the perimeter is well fortified — no one is worried about someone breaking into jail.”
Ron DeSantis is having a rough go of his presidential campaign. His solution? “Start slitting throats”, as the Guardian Martin Pengelly reports:
Rightwing Florida governor and 2024 presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis was widely condemned after he said that if elected to the White House, he would “start slitting throats” in the federal bureaucracy on his first day in power.
The president of the National Treasury Employees Union, Tony Reardon, called the hardline Republican’s comment “repulsive and unworthy of the presidential campaign trail”.
The president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), Everett Kelly, said: “Governor DeSantis’ threat to ‘start slitting throats’ of federal employees is dangerous, disgusting, disgraceful and disqualifying.”
Among commentators, the columnist Max Boot called DeSantis’s words “deranged” while Bill Kristol, founder of the Bulwark, a conservative site, said the governor was “making a bold play to dominate the maniacal psychopath lane in the Republican primary”.
DeSantis is a clear second in the Republican primary but more than 30 points behind Donald Trump in most averages, notwithstanding the former president’s proliferating legal jeopardy including 78 criminal charges.
Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie visited Ukraine on Friday and met with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in an attempt to underscore US support for Kyiv by one of the people bidding to be the next Republican president of the US.
The former New Jersey governor met Zelenskiy at the presidential palace after visiting a mass grave in Bucha and touring damage in Iprin. Christie also toured a child protection center in Kyiv.
I had a meeting with a member of the Republican Party, former Governor of New Jersey, Christopher Christie. And it is very important that Mr. Christie began his visit to Ukraine with a visit to Bucha to see with his own eyes the threat to freedom and to everyone in the world… pic.twitter.com/yZCoAiek4R
— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) August 4, 2023
Other Republican candidates, including frontrunner Donald Trump, have been critical of the cost of supporting Ukraine. Florida governor Ron DeSantis earlier this year suggested that the war was simply a “territorial dispute” before backtracking. Another candidate, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, has called for an immediate end to the war and for Russia to keep its territorial gains.
Former vice-president Mike Pence and US senator Tim Scott of South Carolina are also in the race, and Reuters notes both have argued it remains vital for the US to push back against Russian aggression.
For more updates on Russia’s war in Ukraine, follow our live blog.
Trump calls on supreme court to 'intercede' in his criminal cases
A day after pleading not guilty to federal charges related to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection, Donald Trump is calling on the US supreme court to intercede in the legal battles he is facing.
Trump, in a Truth Social post earlier today, repeated accusations that the legal troubles he brought upon himself amount to “election interference” from President Joe Biden.
He said Biden “hit me with a barrage of weak lawsuits” that will “require massive amounts of my time [and] money to adjudicate”, resources that he claimed would have been used for advertising and rallies.
Trump added:
I am leading in all Polls, including against Crooked Joe, but this is not a level playing field. It is Election Interference, & the Supreme Court must intercede. MAGA!
Mounting legal fees have forced Trump to drain his campaign’s financial resources ahead of the GOP primary season. In filings with the Federal Election Commission FEC) on Monday, Trump’s political action committee, Save America, said that at the end of June it had less than $4m cash on hand, having paid tens of millions of dollars in legal fees for the former president and associates.
Joe Biden’s re-election team has apparently discovered a fundraising boon by subverting a foul-mouthed rightwing chant.
Axios reported that “Dark Brandon” items, including mugs and T-shirts, are responsible for more than half of the Biden campaign’s merchandising sales.
The Dark Brandon meme, which typically shows the president with red, laserlike eyes, emerged as a reaction to the Republican term: “Let’s go Brandon” – a phrase which is widely interpreted as code for “Fuck Joe Biden”.
The image of Biden, which first gained ground in 2022, has “been fashioned into a boast, depicting Biden playing five-dimensional chess, a master of the political dark arts”, Politico reported.
Biden’s campaign has seized upon the Dark Brandon concept, and the image of a smiling, crimson-eyed Biden has been slapped on all manner of campaign merchandise.
Visitors to the Biden-Harris official store can purchase Dark Brandon baseball caps, tote bags, and other paraphernalia, and according to Axios the “Dark” items are responsible for 54% of the store’s revenue.
The surge in revenue comes at a good time for the Biden campaign, which has been struggling to raise money from small donors, defined as people who donate $200 or less.
The New York Times reported that the Biden campaign and the Biden Victory Fund, a joint committee of the campaign, raised $10.2m from small donors across April-May, less than half the amount Barack Obama raised during the same period in 2011.
Let’s Go Brandon entered common parlance in 2021, following an incident at a Nascar race in Alabama.
After the race, some members of the crowd chanted “Fuck Joe Biden” while Brandon Brown, a driver, was being interviewed. The interviewer suggested the crowd were actually chanting “Let’s go Brandon”, and the subverted version became popular among Republicans, including some members of Congress.
The day so far
Supreme court justices are careful about what they say in public, but the calls from Senate Democrats for the nation’s top jurors to adopt a code of ethics clearly have their attention. Liberal justice Elena Kagan weighed in on the matter yesterday, saying that Congress does indeed have the authority to regulate the court, though stopped short of outright endorsing a code of conduct. Her comments came after conservative justice Samuel Alito said he felt otherwise, which caused Democrats to call for him to recuse himself from ethics cases.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
The federal judge handling Donald Trump’s trial over the Mar-a-Lago documents made errors when she presided over another criminal case earlier this year, Reuters found.
Hiring remained steady in July, newly released government data indicates, but there were signs the labor market may be slowing down.
Trump’s attorneys have dropped a long-shot effort to block his potential indictment in Georgia over his attempt to overturn the state’s 2020 election result.
Reuters has a report out today that raised questions about the abilities of Aileen Cannon, the federal judge handling Donald Trump’s trial in Florida on charges related to stashing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort and conspiring to keep them out of the hands of government archivists.
Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Trump, already drew scrutiny last year with a ruling in the investigative stage of the Mar-a-Lago case that was seen by some as partial to the former president. After he was indicted by special counsel Jack Smith in June, Cannon was randomly chosen to preside over his criminal trial.
Cannon is a relatively inexperienced federal judge, and since Trump’s trial deals with classified materials, it is expected to be complex. Reuters reports that earlier this year, Cannon made several errors in the early stages of another defendant’s trial, and prosecutors later entered into an unusual plea agreement with the defendant. The story quotes several legal experts worrying over whether Cannon’s mistakes could bode ill for her ability to handle the proceedings in the Trump case.
Here’s more from their story:
Florida-based U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon closed jury selection for the trial of an Alabama man - accused by federal prosecutors of running a website with images of child sex abuse - to the defendant’s family and the general public, a trial transcript obtained by Reuters showed. A defendant’s right to a public trial is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution’s Sixth Amendment.
Cannon, a 42-year-old former federal prosecutor appointed by Trump to the bench in 2020 late in his presidency, also neglected to swear in the prospective jury pool - an obligatory procedure in which people who may serve on the panel pledge to tell the truth during the selection process. This error forced Cannon to re-start jury selection before the trial ended abruptly with defendant William Spearman pleading guilty as part of an agreement with prosecutors.
Cannon’s decision to close the courtroom represents “a fundamental constitutional error,” said Stephen Smith, a professor at the Santa Clara School of Law in California. “She ignored the public trial right entirely. It’s as though she didn’t know it existed.”
In Cannon’s decision to close jury selection, the judge cited space restrictions in her small courtroom at the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce, Florida.
Legal experts said closing a courtroom to the public has been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as a “structural error” - a mistake so significant that it can invalidate a criminal trial because it strikes at the heart of the entire process. A public trial also has been found to implicate First Amendment rights of freedom of assembly, speech and press.
Cannon’s decision raises questions about how she will handle the intense public interest at Trump’s trial, which is scheduled to begin on May 20, 2024, in the same courtroom.
The unprecedented prosecution of a former president as he campaigns seeking a return to the White House promises to bring enormous public scrutiny. The trial also will represent the first time that Cannon handles a case involving classified evidence and the arcane rules surrounding it.
Cannon’s trial errors also illustrate her judicial inexperience, five former federal judges - Democratic and Republican appointees - said in interviews.
“A lack of experience can be really hard in a big case, especially when there’s all this media attention and everything you do is being watched and commented on and second-guessed,” said Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge who leads the Berkeley Judicial Institute in California.
Fogel said Cannon made “two fairly significant mistakes” during jury selection in the June trial.
“It looms larger because of who the judge is,” Fogel added.
All signs point to Donald Trump soon being indicted for the fourth time this year by Fani Willis, the district attorney in Georgia’s Fulton county, who has been investigating his efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s election win in the state three years ago.
But the former president’s attorneys have been fighting the inquiry, including by filing two motions attempting to get Willis, a Democrat, thrown off the case. Earlier this week, a judge in the county turned down one of the motions, and Reuters reports that today, Trump’s lawyers have decided to drop the other one.
Here’s more from Reuters:
The pending motion, which was to be heard next week, was rendered unnecessary because of a judge’s ruling on Monday in an earlier, similar motion by Trump’s team, the lawyers said in a filing on Thursday in Fulton County Superior Court.
The lawyers also said they intended to appeal Monday’s ruling by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney.
Trump’s team had filed the second motion because they said the first one had been left undecided by the judge for too long.
McBurney denied Trump’s request to disqualify the lead prosecutor, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, block any potential indictments and throw out a special grand jury report that included recommendations on who to charge.
The report has remained sealed under McBurney’s orders pending charges in the case, one of many legal troubles Trump faces even as he campaigns to be the Republican nominee in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
Willis has indicated she intends to ask a grand jury to approve charges sometime in the next three weeks, telling judges that her staff will mostly work remotely as a safety precaution.
Speaking of presidents, Donald Trump appeared in a federal court in Washington DC yesterday and pleaded not guilty to four charges brought against him for plotting to overturn the 2020 election. It was the third indictment he has faced since the start of the year, but none of his legal issues appear to have significantly undermined support for his presidential run. In case you missed it, here is the report on yesterday events, from the Guardian’s Joan E Greve and Hugo Lowell:
Donald Trump pleaded not guilty Thursday to federal charges over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, marking the third time this year the former president has been forced to respond to a criminal indictment.
Trump was arrested and arraigned on four felony counts outlined in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights.
The arraignment came two days after Smith’s office filed its indictment, accusing Trump of executing a “criminal scheme” to remain in office even after it became clear that he had fairly lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden.
Trump traveled from his Bedminster Club in New Jersey to Washington on Thursday with his lawyers and several top aides to appear at the arraignment. He was formally arrested at the E Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse, just blocks from the US Capitol, where the deadly January 6 insurrection unfolded.
Biden cheers employment data despite signs of labor market weakness
Joe Biden has issued an upbeat statement on the jobs data the labor department released this morning, even though the report brought hints that hiring and employment may be slowing down.
The president is counting on a strong economy to propel him to a second term in office in next year’s presidential election, and data has lately broken his way, with inflation dropping and hiring remaining resilient even as the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates to cut into the wave of price increases that began shortly after Biden took office.
But today’s jobs report contained signs that hot streak may be ending. As the Guardian’s Lauren Aratani reported, the past two months saw the weakest employment gains in the past two-and-a-half years:
US employers added 187,000 jobs in July, less than expected and a sign that the labor market is cooling after a series of interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve have driven rates to their highest level in 22 years.
The jobs market has continued to add at least 200,000 new jobs each month this year, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). But that compares to an average monthly gain of 400,000 in 2022.
July’s gains were just 2,000 more than the jobs added in June. The BLS revised June’s job gain down to 185,000, a cut of 24,000 jobs. It also cut May’s jobs number. Together, June and July represent the two weakest monthly gains in two and a half years.
While the jobs market remains robust, July’s gains represent a considerable dip compared to January of this year, when 472,000 jobs were added. The unemployment rate has remained stable at 3.5%, the same rate seen in June and close to the historically low rates seen before 2020.
Healthcare and social assistance accounted for the most new positions in July, adding 87,000 new jobs. The government added 15,000 new jobs.
Biden nonetheless struck an upbeat tone in a statement released by the White House:
Unemployment near a record low and the share of working age Americans who have jobs at a 20-year high: that’s Bidenomics. Our economy added 187,000 jobs last month, and we’ve added 13.4 million jobs since I took office -- more jobs added in two and a half years than during any president’s four-year term. The unemployment rate is 3.5%, marking a full year and half below 4%. This follows recent news that our economy continues to grow, while inflation has fallen by nearly two thirds and is at its lowest level in more than two years. We’re growing the economy from the middle out and bottom up, lowering costs for hardworking families, and making smart investments in America.
For more on today’s data, check out our story:
Here are the comments on supreme court ethics from justice Elana Kagan, one of the three liberals currently serving.
Courtesy of CSPAN:
Justice Elena Kagan: "It just can't be that the Court is the only institution that somehow is not subject to any checks and balances from anybody else. I mean, we're not imperial...So, can Congress do various things to regulate the Supreme Court? I think the answer is yes." pic.twitter.com/6Sz3uAhGup
— CSPAN (@cspan) August 4, 2023
Senate Democrats call for Alito's recusal after comments on supreme court ethics
Senate Democrats have asked supreme court chief justice John Roberts to ensure that Samuel Alito recuses himself from cases involving the panel’s ethics, citing comments he made in a recent interview.
The letter sent on Thursday and signed by 10 Democratic senators on the judiciary committee cites Alito’s comments to the Wall Street Journal’s right-leaning editorial board, in which he said of Congress, “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”
The comments from Alito, one of the most prominent of the six conservative justices who form a majority block on the court, came after the judiciary committee approved legislation that would require the court to adopt an ethics code, in response to media reports recently that showed ties between the justices and parties with interests in their decisions.
“By opining on the constitutionality of legislation under consideration by the U.S. Senate and agreeing to sit for interviews conducted in part by an attorney with a case currently pending before the Court, Justice Alito violated a key tenet of the Statement on Ethics Principles and Practices … to which all Supreme Court Justices purport to subscribe as well as the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges,” the senators wrote.
“We therefore urge you to take appropriate steps to ensure that Justice Alito will recuse himself in any future cases concerning legislation that regulates the Court.”
They also request that he recuse himself from Moore v United States, a pending case that challenges that constitutionality of wealth taxes, which are supported by some progressive Democrats. Attorney David Rivkin is representing the plaintiffs in that case, and also took part in the Journal’s interview with Alito.
Justice Kagan’s comments at the Portland conference came soon after a Senate committee voted to advance a bill that would tighten financial disclosures and bolster recusal requirements for justices.
The bill prompted a strong response from conservative Justice Samuel Alito who said lawmakers imposing ethics rules on the court would violate the separation of powers.
But Kagan, who insisted she was not responding directly to Alito’s criticism, said: “Of course, Congress can regulate various aspects of what the supreme court does. Congress funds the supreme court. Congress historically has made changes to the court’s structure and composition. Congress has made changes to the court’s appellate jurisdiction.”
She did insist this did not mean Congress could do whatever it wanted.
'We're not imperial': Liberal justice Kagan argues Congress does have authority to regulate supreme court
Good morning, US politics blog readers. Donald Trump came and went from Washington DC yesterday after pleading not guilty to charges related to trying to overturn the election, but the legacy of his presidency can be found all across the capital, particularly at the supreme court. He decisively shifted its ideological makeup to the right by appointing three conservative justices to the bench, and in the years since, they’ve handed down decisions with major implications for American life, including by overturning Roe v Wade last year and allowing states to fully ban abortion.
But a series of media reports this year have revealed questionable ties between some of the justices and people with interests in their decisions. Senate Democrats are now trying to pass legislation that would require the justices to adopt a code of ethics, and that, too, appears to have been caught up in the court’s ideological split. Last week, conservative justice Samuel Alito said in an interview that Congress has no authority to impose such rules on the court. But at an event yesterday, liberal justice Elena Kagan indicated that she believed lawmakers did indeed have that power.
Kagan told the audiences of judges and lawyers in Portland, Oregon: “It just can’t be that the court is the only institution that somehow is not subject to checks and balances from anybody else. We’re not imperial.”
Politico also quotes her as saying:
“Can Congress do various things to regulate the Supreme Court? I think the answer is: yes.”
We’ll keep an eye out to see if lawmakers have anything to say about these comments today.
Here’s what else is going on:
Employment data released just now indicates the US labor market remains strong, which is good news for both Joe Biden and the Federal Reserve’s campaign to curb inflation. Follow our live blog for more.
A new poll of Iowa Republicans shows Trump is the presidential frontrunner there, but he’s not quite as popular in the early voting state as he is nationwide.
Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy again made clear he remains in Trump’s camp, including when it comes to the latest federal charges leveled against the former president.
Updated
