Closing summary
It’s 6pm Eastern time. Here’s a recap of today’s developments:
Peter Navarro, a White House adviser to Donald Trump, was found guilty of contempt of Congress when he refused to cooperate with an investigation of the deadly January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Navarro, who had promoted his baseless claims of mass voter fraud, was convicted of two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress, both punishable by up to a year behind bars.
Donald Trump filed notice in Fulton County that he “may” seek to have his 2020 election subversion case removed to federal court. Sources told the Guardian that Trump’s legal team is waiting to see what happens with former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and his arguments before taking that step. There is warranted skepticism that Trump’s efforts to remove the case will prove successful.
Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, accused House judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan of improperly interfering in her criminal prosecution of Trump and 18 other allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. In a scathing nine-page letter to Jordan, Willis said the congressman “lack[s] a basic understanding of the law” and that “there is no justification in the Constitution for Congress to interfere with a state criminal matter, as you attempt to do.”
Willis on Wednesday asked a judge to shield prospective jurors’ identities, after grand jurors who indicted Trump and his 18 co-defendants last month faced harassment after their names and addresses were posted online. Willis has also faced racist online abuse amid a proliferation of calls to violence across far-right sites since the charges were made public.
A majority of likely Democratic voters say the party should nominate someone other than Joe Biden for president next year, according to a new poll. Biden’s own poll numbers remain stubbornly low – the president’s approval rating was just 39%, while nearly 60% of respondents said they thought Biden’s policies had made economic conditions worse and 76% said they were seriously concerned that, at 80, the president was too old to serve a full term if re-elected.
The White House is bracing for political trench warfare after prosecutors pursuing Joe Biden’s son on a gun possession charge said they would seek a criminal indictment by the end of September. The prospect of Hunter Biden standing trial is likely to energise Republicans preparing to launch an impeachment inquiry into the president even as Congress tries to avert a government shutdown.
The Democratic Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman directly dismissed Republican moves towards impeaching Joe Biden, saying doing so could end up hurting the GOP. “Go ahead. Do it, I dare you,” Fetterman told reporters on Capitol Hill. “If you can find the votes, go ahead, because you’re going to lose. It’s a loser. It would just be like a big circle jerk on the fringe right.”
Florida governor Ron DeSantis vowed to fight recent efforts to respond to a rise in coronavirus cases across the US, while his state surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, warned against the latest Covid-19 vaccine. At a Jacksonville news conference on Thursday, DeSantis and Ladapo promised Florida would not join states, cities or school districts across the country in temporarily closing schools or mandating mask-wearing because of the recent uptick in Covid-19 cases.
During the same press conference, DeSantis lashed out at an audience member who blamed him for the recent racist killing in Jacksonville that left three Black people dead. The unidentified audience member accused DeSantis of allowing “people to hunt people like me”, to which the governor responded: “That is such nonsense!”
In a heated interview, the Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy four times refused to answer the MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan when asked to explain his own words: that Donald Trump’s “abhorrent” behaviour made him a “danger to democracy”.
South Dakota governor Kristi Noem is expected to endorse Donald Trump at a campaign rally in the state on Friday, according to a report, amid speculation the Republican governor could be potential running mate for the former president if he wins the GOP nomination.
Updated
Much will be riding on Donald Trump’s ability to remove the case to federal court.
The racketeering charge filed against Trump carries a sentence of five to 20 years in prison. If Trump were convicted in Georgia, he could not pardoned by a sympathetic president because the charges were filed at the state level. In Georgia, the governor does not even have the power to issue pardons, as that duty lies with the state’s board of pardons and paroles.
According to Ronald Carlson, a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, Trump could not even apply for a pardon until he has been convicted and served five years in a Georgia prison. He said:
The stakes for the Trump team are really high in Georgia, so I expect a full-fledged defense by President Trump. Probably a lot of that will verge on political bias.
Trump has already offered a preview of that politically driven strategy. In a statement issued last month, Trump’s presidential campaign attacked Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis as a “radical Democrat” and “rabid partisan”. Despite those personal attacks, Willis appeared undaunted as she spoke to reporters shortly after the indictment was unsealed.
Eric Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law, believes Trump may succeed at removing the case to federal court, but he expressed hope that a group of Georgians will eventually have the opportunity to issue a verdict on the former president’s election subversion efforts. He said:
I’m talking as a citizen more than as a law professor, but I think Donald Trump is an existential threat to our country. And I think a Georgia jury should decide if he broke the law in Georgia.
