Closing summary
We’re closing down this liveblog here after another lively, dare we say frenetic day in US politics. For developments in the Russia-Ukraine conflict please turn to our main blog here. Please join us again tomorrow.
Here’s where the day went:
- Joe Biden promised to “ratchet up the pain” on Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, as he announced a new round of sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine.
- The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, joined a growing number of Biden administration officials and Democratic politicians, including the commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, and two congressmen, in testing positive for Covid-19.
- Earlier, Garland hosted a justice department press conference announcing conspiracy charges for one Russian oligarch and the seizure of another’s mega-yacht plus millions of dollars in assets.
- The US supreme court reinstated, for now, a Donald Trump-era rule denying states’ rights to enforce clean water regulations.
- Defense officials confirmed that members of the Ukraine military were being trained in the US on the operation of lethal drones.
They work in the halls of power, some for decades, serving lunch to the building’s 100 senators and brewing coffee for over-caffeinated staffers.
Today, they are picketing outside the US Capitol, calling on the senators they have served during a pandemic and during an insurrection to help find a solution that would avert massive layoffs.
Senate cafeteria workers are ON THE MOVE! Today, they're organizing a picket line outside the Capitol to demonstrate against layoffs and to call on Senators to support their fight for a fair first contract. 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/YZZPERRhxi
— UNITE HERE (@unitehere) April 6, 2022
Eighty one senate food service workers have been notified that their jobs were at risk, according to UNITE HERE Local 23, which represents them.
Talks are reportedly under way among lawmakers to legislate a fix, at least in the short-term. Ahead of the demonstration, several pro-union, Democratic senators met with workers to show their support, including Bernie Sanders, Catherine Cortez-Masto and Sherrod Brown.
Thank you Senator @BernieSanders for supporting Senate cafeteria workers fighting to protect their jobs and to ensure that their jobs are good jobs! pic.twitter.com/pKRpicxvS8
— UNITE HERE (@unitehere) April 6, 2022
The workers are not employed by the legislative branch, but by the contractor Restaurant Associates.
After several unsuccessful attempts to organize, a majority of workers agreed to unionize last year, citing years of low wages, poor benefits and a lack of job security. According to the union, only 18% of workers are enrolled in health insurance through the company because it is unaffordable at their current wage scale.
Negotiations with Restaurant Associates are ongoing.
Psaki was asked about new sanctions on Russia imposed by the White House earlier today, including why individuals, including Russian president Vladimir Putin’s adult daughters, were targeted.
“We’ve seen a pattern over time of President Putin and Russian oligarchs stashing assets and resources in the bank accounts and of their family members, so this was an effort to get at those assets,” she said. “That’s why these individuals were sanctioned.
“We’ve seen Russia’s economy collapse by 15%, wiping out the gains made in the last 15 years, inflation is spiking up to 15%. Russia is set to lose its status as a major economy and our objective is to implement those consequences to make it much more difficult for President Putin to fund the war.”
Another question was whether the US could keep up the cost of support for Ukraine - $2.4bn so far since the invasion began - if the prediction by the US joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley that the conflict could last years proved true.
“We have warned that we’re entering a new phase of the conflict that could last for some time. It doesn’t mean it will look exactly the same, or the needs or the resources will be exactly the same,” she said.
“Our focus is on amping up and providing a range of military assistance, the $100m for Javelin [missiles] is a good example, also humanitarian and economic assistance. I can’t make an assessment about sustaining [support] because obviously this war and the needs will change over the course of time.”
Asked what she thought Russia’s “endgame” was, Psaki replied: “They have moved their troops around and repositioned. They haven’t made many airstrikes in the last 24 hours, according to department of defense. We also know that their goal remains weakening Ukraine as much as possible.”
The daily White House briefing is under way almost an hour later than advertised, and press secretary Jen Psaki is taking a dig at Republicans in Congress she says are stalling on a bipartisan push for a Covid-19 relief deal.
The White House wants $22.5bn, and a $10bn funding agreement for vaccines, treatments and tests was reached “in principle” last week between senior Republicans, including the Utah senator Mitt Romney, and Democrats last week.
But that deal appears to have fallen apart following the Biden administration’s decision to end the Trump-era Title 42 immigration policy that blocked refugees at the US southern border because of the pandemic.
Republicans have seized on the apparent contradiction of the administration indicating the pandemic is over at the border while seeking billions of dollars in relief to continue fighting it.
“At every step of the way we’ve provided the details that Republicans have asked for, even when what they’ve asked for has changed in real time,” Psaki said, wielding a binder she said contained 385 pages of information provided to congress.
“The question we have is whether Republicans are acting in good faith… or just playing politics. We know BA.2 is here. We know that it is more transmissible. We know that it is leading to increased cases and we know we’re already seeing an impact on our resources.
“The president knows that we can’t afford inaction in this moment. It’s going to require politicians to stop skirting their responsibility to the American people. Covid is not over.”
The House of Representatives will vote tonight on possible contempt of Congress charges against Donald Trump aides Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino for their refusal to cooperate with the January 6 investigation.
The bipartisan panel issued subpoenas for Navarro, a trade advisor in the Trump White House, and Scavino, the former president’s deputy chief of staff, to testify earlier this year. Both failed to respond.
Contempt of congress is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and fines of up to $100,000, according to NBC.
The bipartisan inquiry into Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election defeat by Joe Biden has been making significant recent headway. Ivanka Trump, the one-term president’s daughter and adviser, testified yesterday, and her husband Jared Kushner, a former senior White House adviser, appeared before the panel last week.
Read more about the 6 January inquiry here:
Updated
Joe Biden spoke ebulliently of the nascent success of labor organizing at the world’s biggest corner store - Amazon.com - in the wake of the historic victory in New York by a group of workers who voted last week to form a union.
“By the way, Amazon here we come,” the beaming US president said after he took the stage at North America’s building trades union legislative conference in Washington, DC, and spoke earlier.
The vote at a warehouse in the New York city borough of Staten Island victory marked the first successful US organizing effort in the company’s history.
Organizers have faced an uphill battle against Amazon, which now employs over one million people in the US and is making every effort to keep unions out.
“Watch! Watch!” Biden said, to sustained clapping, cheering and whistling from the venue packed with union leaders this afternoon.
It’s worth noting that the established unions don’t impress Chris Smalls, the ordinary American-turned-working class hero who started to organize in earnest after he was laid off when he led a walk-out at his Amazon warehouse in March 2020 to protest unsafe conditions in the coronavirus pandemic, and capped his efforts with the milestone union vote.
In a talk with the Guardian yesterday he lamented how much noise the unions had made over the years about organizing at Amazon without achieving any such thing, while independent efforts by the workers had got to the yes vote.
But Biden was also celebrating the bigger picture of union power, saying that unions built the middle class of America and afforded members the dignity of decent jobs in terms of pay and conditions.
“When was the last time the ‘trickle down’ economy trickled down to someone you know?” he asked the conference floor.
“We are going to rebuild the backbone of America, the middle class, the working people and try to unify the people - that’s been the hardest thing, you cannot have a democracy function unless we have consensus,” Biden said.
This is Smalls.
Updated
Attorney general Merrick Garland tests positive for Covid-19
The US attorney general Merrick Garland has tested positive for Covid-19, hours after presenting a press conference at the justice department to announce actions against “Russian criminality.”
Garland, 69, is not experiencing any symptoms, but asked to be tested on Wednesday afternoon after learning he may have been exposed to the virus, according to a report on CNN.
Fears are growing that the Gridiron dinner at the Renaissance hotel in Washington DC on Saturday, which Garland attended, may turn out to be a super-spreader event. Democratic congressmen Adam Schiff and Joaquin Castro, and the commerce secretary Gina Raimondo, have all announced positive Covid-19 tests after attending the dinner.
Garland, who is vaccinated and boosted, presented this morning’s briefing alongside the FBI director Christopher Wray, and other justice department officials. There is no confirmation yet if Wray has also taken a Covid-19 test.
Covid-19 update: the commerce secretary Gina Raimondo and assistant House speaker Katherine Clark have been added to Washington DC’s coronavirus roster, following earlier news that the Democratic California congressman Adam Schiff had tested positive.
The Hill reports that Raimondo and Clark, a Democratic representative for Massachusetts, are both in quarantine after their own positive tests. Raimondo and Schiff were attendees at the Gridiron dinner in the capital on Saturday, according to reports, joining hundreds of other politicians, journalists and Washington insiders who heard the Republican New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu brand Donald Trump “fucking crazy” in a roast.
Another politician at the dinner, the Texas Democratic congressman Joaquin Castro, tested positive for Covid-19 on Tuesday.
Raimondo is experiencing “mild symptoms,” according to a commerce department statement, and will work at home for at least five days.
Clark did not attend the Gridiron dinner, Politico reported. Both she and Raimondo are vaccinated and boosted, the Hill said.
Joe Biden said sanctions already imposed would “likely wipe out” at least 15 years of Russia’s economic gains, and praised the private companies who had unilaterally withdrawn from Russia.
“We’re going to stifle Russia’s ability for its economy to grow for years to come. Folks, this is the United States taking additional steps in lockstep with our allies and partners to raise economic pressure on Putin,” the president said.
“Corporate America is stepping up, McDonald’s, Exxon, they’ve left the Russian market on their own accord. Six hundred of them, think about that, the private businesses choosing to leave Russia rather than risk being associated with Putin’s brutal war.”
Biden also listed other steps the US and allies were taking, including steeper financial sanctions and the provision of weapons and security equipment for Ukraine to defend itself.
“The ban on investment is going to make sure that new money can’t come into Russia to replace what’s left,” he said, adding that revenue-generating state owned companies would be added to list of enterprises cut off from business dealings with the US.
These sweeping financial sanctions follow our action earlier this week to cut off Russia’s frozen funds in the United States to make debt payments.
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 6, 2022
Read more: https://t.co/4aA2jMA1rc
Turning to individual sanctions on Russian elites, Biden noted: “Think about the incredible amounts of money these oligarchs have stolen. These oligarchs and their family members are not allowed to hold on to their wealth in Europe and the US and keep these yachts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, their luxury vacation homes, while children in Ukraine are being killed, displaced from their homes every single day.
“Finally, we’re continuing to supply Ukraine with the weapons resources they need. Today I signed another package to send more Javelin missiles, those shoulder mounted missiles that can take out tanks and armored vehicles.
“We won’t be able to advertise every piece of security we give... but advanced weapons and ammunition are flowing in every single day.”
Updated
Biden pledges to 'ratchet up the pain' on Putin and Russia
Joe Biden is promising to “ratchet up the pain” on Russia and its president Vladimir Putin as he speaks in Washington DC about new sanctions imposed Wednesday by the US and its allies.
The president was tearful as he took the stage at North America’s Building trades union legislative conference, talking of the “horrifying atrocities” coming to light in Ukraine.
“I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures from Bucha and outside of Kyiv, bodies left in streets as Russian troops withdrew, some shot in the back of the head with their hands tied behind their backs, civilians executed in cold blood, bodies dumped into mass graves, a sense of brutality and humanity left for all the world to see unapologetically,” Biden said.
“There’s nothing less happening than major war crimes. Responsible nations have to come together to hold these perpetrators accountable. And together with our allies and our partners, we’re going to keep raising the economic cost and ratchet up the pain for Putin and further increase Russia’s economic isolation.”
Updated
The US and its allies are preparing to impose new sanctions on Moscow over civilian killings in Ukraine as the west makes a fresh attempt to cripple Vladimir Putin’s economy and war effort.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy described the atrocities in his country as “war crimes” while Ukraine authorities said close to more than 4,400 incidents were being investigated.
“Russia will be responsible for Bucha in The Hague,” Ukraine’s prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova said in a statement.
Western sanctions on Russia over its nearly six-week invasion of its neighbour gained new impetus this week after bodies of civilians shot at close range were discovered in the town of Bucha, after a retreat by Russian forces.
Russia, in playbook style, has denied responsibility and suggested the images are fake or the deaths occurred after its troops pulled out. However, satellite images show that bodies were lying on streets in Bucha for days before Russian troops left the town.
The White House said sanctions to be unveiled on Wednesday were in part a response to Bucha. The measures, coordinated between Washington, G7 economies and the European Union, will target Russian banks and officials and ban new investment in Russia.
“The goal is to force them to make a choice,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said. “The biggest part of our objective here is to deplete the resources that Putin has to continue his war against Ukraine.”
Psaki declined to comment on reports in the Wall Street Journal that the sanctions would target Putin’s two daughters.
Proposed EU sanctions, which the bloc’s 27 member states must approve, would ban buying Russian coal and prevent Russian ships from entering EU ports. Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, said the bloc was also working on banning oil imports. Europe, which obtains about a third of its natural gas from Russia, has been wary of the economic impact a total ban on Russian energy would bring.
But signalling strengthening EU resolve, Germany’s foreign minister said the coal ban was the first step toward an embargo on all Russian fossil fuel imports.
Renewed pressure from the west comes after Zelenskiy gave the UN security council a harrowing account of atrocities in his country and demanded that Russian leaders be “brought to justice for war crimes”.
More here. And follow our global, 24/7 blog on the Ukraine crisis here.
Ukrainians being trained in US on use of lethal drones - defense official
A small number of Ukrainians already in the United States are being trained on how to use Switchblade drones, a senior US defense official said this afternoon, Reuters reports.
The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the training was for less than a dozen Ukrainian personnel already in the US undergoing military education and the expectation was that they would be heading back to Ukraine soon.
Bloomberg News reported earlier this week that the Pentagon is planning to send 10 state-of-the-art Switchblade drones to Ukraine as it fights back against Russia’s invasion and bombardment.
The remote-controlled weapons would be armed with tank-busting warheads - in addition to previously announced deliveries of a less powerful version, Bloomberg reported, citing separate unnamed sources.
The new drones are part of a $300m package of weaponry support for Ukraine announced by the department of defense last week, bought from suppliers rather than taken from US government stockpiles.
Defense secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed the drone delivery plans.
Updated
Supreme Court reinstates Trump-era water rule for now
News from the US supreme court that’s not about the confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. The conservative leaning panel has reinstated a Trump-era rule restricting states’ powers to reject federal permits issued under the clean water act.
According to reporting by CNN, the chief justice John Roberts sided with the court’s liberal justices in dissent, arguing that the supreme court’s emergency docket procedures were not appropriate for the handling of the original request for the measure in 2020.
“That renders the Court’s emergency docket not for emergencies at all,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote on behalf of the four dissenters.
The environmental group Earthjustice slammed the ruling. “[It] shows disregard for the integrity of the Clean Water Act and undermines the rights of Tribes and states to review and reject dirty fossil fuel projects that threaten their water,” Moneen Nasmith, the group’s senior attorney, said in a statement.
The high court’s action does not interfere with the Biden administration’s plan to rewrite the rule, Reuters further reports.
Work on a revision has begun, but the administration has said a final rule is not expected until the spring of 2023. The Trump-era rule will remain in effect in the meantime.
The Biden administration had told the justices in a court filing that it agreed that the US district court judge William Alsup lacked the authority to throw out the rule without first determining that it was invalid.
But the administration had urged the court not to reinstate the rule, saying that in the months since the Alsup’s ruling, officials have adapted to the change, reverting to regulations in place for decades.
Another change would “cause substantial disruption and disserve the public interest,” the administration said.
Updated
Good news for former students still wrestling with college and university loans: the Biden administration has, as expected, extended a pause on repayments until the end of August.
The student debt crisis in the US is to blame at least in part for the president’s slumping approval ratings, and experts have warned of a looming disaster once repayments were forced to begin again following the moratorium for the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The Department of Education is committed to ensuring that student loan borrowers have a smooth transition back to repayment. This additional extension will allow borrowers to gain more financial security as the economy continues to improve and as the nation continues to recover from the pandemic,” the education secretary Miguel Cardona said in a press release.
Student loan debt in the US totals $189tn, the education department says, with more than 43m former and current students owing an average of more than $37,000 each. The extension halts repayments, interest and collections.
BREAKING: ED has announced an extension of the pause on federal student loan repayment, interest, & collections through August 31, 2022. https://t.co/xHfcO6dnV4 [🧵 1/3] pic.twitter.com/Adg6wu54TL
— U.S. Department of Education (@usedgov) April 6, 2022
New US sanctions target Putin's adult children
Two of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s adult children are included in a new round of “devastating” sanctions the Biden administration announced on Wednesday.
The penalties, in partnership with the UK and the European Union, also targeted two of Russia’s largest banks, Sberbank and Alfa, preventing the banks’ assets going through their financial systems.
There is also a ban on new investment in Russia and a European embargo on coal, according to an Associated Press analysis of the measures:
In addition to sanctions aimed at Putin’s adult daughters, Mariya Putina and Katerina Tikhonova, the US is targeting prime minister Mikhail Mishustin; the wife and children of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov; and members of Russia’s Security Council, including Dmitry Medvedev, a former president and prime minister.
The penalties cut off all of Putin’s close family members from the US financial system and freeze any assets they hold in the United States.
The western partners “will continue to impose severe and immediate economic costs on the Putin regime for its atrocities in Ukraine, including in Bucha,” the White House announcement states.
I made clear that Russia would pay a severe and immediate price for its atrocities in Bucha. Today, along with our Allies and partners, we’re announcing a new round of devastating sanctions. https://t.co/LVqTDIOSvz
— President Biden (@POTUS) April 6, 2022
Meanwhile, the justice department has posted to its website details of the indictment of Konstantin Malofeyev, 47, announced at attorney general Merrick Garland’s earlier press conference.
The justice department alleges Malofeyev illegally attempted to transfer $10m in US investments to a business associate in Greece in violation of existing sanctions against him. The money has been seized, and while Malofeyev’s whereabouts are unknown, he is likely in Russia, the department says.
According to Michael Driscoll, assistant director of the FBI’s New York field office, Malofeyev: “played a leading role in supporting Russia’s 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine, continues to run a pro-Putin propaganda network, and recently described Russia’s 2022 military invasion of Ukraine as a ‘holy war’.”
US indicts Russian oligarch; seizes megayacht and millions of dollars in Russian assets
The US has indicted a Russian oligarch it says is responsible for spreading the Kremlin’s misinformation around the world, as well as seizing a megayacht belonging to another of Vladimir Putin’s allies, and millions of dollars in assets they held, as the war in Ukraine rages on.
US attorney general Merrick Garland made the announcements today at a press conference at the justice department to announce actions “to prosecute criminal Russian activity.”
He also said that the US and its allies has broken up a massive attempted malware attack that Russia intended to unleash internationally, causing unprecedented disruption of the internet and causing tens of billions of dollars in damages globally.
“Our message to those who continue to enable the Russian regime through their criminal conduct is this: It does not matter how far you sail your yacht. It does not matter how well you conceal your assets. It does not matter how cleverly you write your malware or hide your online activity. The justice department will use every available tool to find you, disrupt your plots and hold you accountable,” Garland said.
The conspiracy charges have been filed against the Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev, who was previously the subject of US sanctions for spreading Russian misinformation.
Garland said he is “one of the main sources of financing for Russians promoting separatism in Crimea and for providing material support for the so called Donetsk People’s Republic.
“After being sanctioned by the US, Malofeyev attempted to evade the sanctions by using co-conspirators to surreptitiously acquire and run media outlets across Europe.”
Garland said the US had seized millions of dollars from an account at a US financial institution which the indictment alleges constitutes proceeds traceable to Malofeyev’s sanctions violations.
Meanwhile, the $90m megayacht Tango, belonging to the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, a close ally of Putin, was seized in Mallorca on Monday. Vekselberg was sanctioned in 2018 for money laundering, and again last month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The malware attack was targeted largely at small businesses with an intention to spreading a massive, attempted denial of service attack intended to disrupt the internet internationally and cause at least $10bn in damages.
“The global botnet [was] controlled by the Russian military intelligence agency, commonly known as the GRU,” Garland said, noting the Russian government had recently used similar infrastructure to attack Ukrainian targets.
“Fortunately, we were able to disrupt this botnet before it could be used. Thanks to our close work with international partners, we were able to detect the infection of thousands of network hardware devices. We are then able to disable the GRU’s control over those devices before the botnet could be weaponized,” he said.
Ukraine war analysts were digesting on Wednesday grim predictions from the top US military commander Mark Milley that the conflict could last “at least years, for sure.”
The chair of the joint chiefs of staff gave his assessment to the House armed services committee on Tuesday after being pressed on a timeline by the Democratic Massachusetts congressman Bill Keating.
“It’s a bit early,” Milley replied. “Even though we’re a month-plus into the war, there is much of the ground war left in Ukraine. But I do think this is a very protracted conflict, and I think it’s at least measured in years. I don’t know about a decade, but at least years for sure.”
In February, before the Russian invasion, the Pentagon estimated Kyiv could fall within the first 72 hours.
Milley said he believed “the potential for significant international conflict between great powers is increasing, not decreasing,” according to the defense department’s own account of the briefing.
Russia’s action was: “the greatest threat to peace and security of Europe and perhaps the world in my 42 years of service in uniform,” Milley said.
The hearing also featured a heated exchange between the Florida Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, and defense secretary Lloyd Austin over “wokeism” in the US military, captured on CNN video here.
The Biden administration announced Tuesday it was sending $100m of javelin anti-armor missiles to Ukraine, bringing its investment in security there to more than $2.4bn, CBS reported.
In coronavirus news, the California Democratic congressman Adam Schiff has announced a positive test and his absence from Washington DC for the immediate future.
“This evening, I unfortunately tested positive for Covid-19,” he said in a tweet posted late Tuesday.
“I’m feeling fine, and grateful to be vaccinated and boosted. In the coming days, I will quarantine and follow CDC [centers for disease control and prevention] guidelines.”
The tweet ends with an appeal to get vaccinated.
Schiff, 61, was lead prosecutor in Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial in January 2020.
This evening, I unfortunately tested positive for COVID-19.
— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) April 6, 2022
I'm feeling fine, and grateful to be vaccinated and boosted. In the coming days, I will quarantine and follow CDC guidelines.
And remember, please get vaccinated!
While we await the justice department/FBI presser about new steps to counter Russian criminality, here’s a look at the right wing figures in the US doing the Kremlin’s bidding in the war of disinformation.
False and conspiratorial narratives pushed by some American conservative politicians and media figures about Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine have bolstered and created synergies with the Kremlin’s legendary disinformation machine, experts on information manipulation say.
But even though Russia has embraced and promoted American disinformation, as well as the Kremlin’s own much larger stock of Ukraine war falsehoods, both brands have been widely debunked by experts and most media outlets, underscoring Moscow’s setbacks in the information war.
Led by Tucker Carlson at Fox News, a few Republican rightwingers in Congress, and some key conservative activists, a spate of comments that have disparaged Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and echoed other Russian war disinformation have been recycled by Moscow, say experts.
Read the full story here:
Good morning live blog readers. We’ve made it to the middle of an extremely busy week in US politics, with plenty more to come.
The US attorney general Merrick Garland will join the FBI director Christopher Wray and other justice department officials at a press conference later this morning to announce new enforcement actions “to disrupt and prosecute criminal Russian activity.” A statement advising of the briefing gave no further details.
Here’s what else we’re watching today:
- The US and allies will announce new sanctions on Russian officials, banks and investments as more evidence of the country’s alleged war crimes in Ukraine comes to light. (A reminder you can follow developments in the Ukraine conflict in our 24-hour live blog here).
- Contempt of Congress charges are expected from the House of Representatives against Donald Trump aides Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro for their failure to cooperate with its committee investigating the 6 January insurrection.
- The confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the US supreme court will nudge ever closer as the US Senate begins to debate her nomination. A final vote is expected late tomorrow or Friday.
- The Democratic California congressman Adam Schiff has tested positive for Covid-19.
