Closing summary
Joe Biden spent the past month barnstorming swing states, while his campaign was busy staffing up, opening offices and reaching out to voters. Was it enough to boost his stubbornly low approval ratings, or help him overtake Donald Trump in the polls? A Wall Street Journal survey released today indicates it is not, with the president trailing his Republican challenger in six of the seven states seen as likely deciding the election – similar to other surveys taken in recent months showing Biden faring poorly against the candidate he bested in 2020. Perhaps more interesting is the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released today, which finds Americans largely agree on values, even if they are deeply divided over who they want as their leader.
Here’s what else happened:
Jack Smith reportedly strongly objected to arguments judge Aileen Cannon is entertaining that Trump is immune from prosecution in the classified documents case, which potentially delay his trial.
Trump held a rally in Michigan yesterday, where he told the crowd he had spoken to the family of a woman allegedly murdered by a man in the US illegally. But her relatives reportedly say none of them have talked to the former president.
Robert F Kennedy, the anti-vaccine activist and independent presidential candidate, walked back a recent comment, where he said Biden was more of a threat to democracy than Trump.
Taiwan is recovering from the strongest earthquake to strike the island in 25 years, with the death toll climbing to nine. Follow our live blog for more on this developing story.
Two brothers pleaded guilty to an insider trading charge connected to Trump’s media company.
Donald Trump and the Republican Party say they raised more than $65.6m in March, the AP reports.
Trump and the Republican National Committee closed out the month with $93.1m in their campaign accounts. That’s a significant increase as they try to catch up to the fundraising of Joe Biden and the Democrats.
Biden and the Democratic National Committee haven’t released their fundraising numbers for March. But their political operation said they brought in $53m in February and closed that month with $155m cash on hand.
Earlier today, Biden-Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a press release: “Our campaign is making early investments to connect directly with voters on the issues that will define this election and to build the infrastructure we need to win.
“The difference between our ground game and Donald Trump’s nonexistent presence in the battleground states couldn’t be more clear – and the failing Trump campaign and the RNC can’t get this time back.”
Confrontation between special counsel and judge could further delay Trump documents case
A confrontation between special counsel Jack Smith and judge Aileen Cannon could further delay Donald Trump’s trial in Florida on charges related to unlawfully possessing classified documents, the Washington Post reports.
At issue is the possibility that Cannon, who Trump appointed to the federal bench in 2020 and who has been criticized for decisions that have slowed down the progress of the case, agrees that the former president is immune from prosecution, under a federal law dealing with presidential records.
Late yesterday, Smith signaled in a filing his strong disagreement with the argument, and that he would appeal to a higher court if necessary. That could further delay the start of the trial, potentially pushing it past the November presidential election.
Here’s more on that, from the Post:
Special counsel Jack Smith warned the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents case that she is pursuing a legal premise that “is wrong” and said he would probably appeal to a higher court if she rules that a federal records law can protect the former president from prosecution.
In a near-midnight legal filing, Smith’s office pushed back hard against an unusual instruction from U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon — one that veteran national security lawyers and former judges have said badly misinterprets the Presidential Records Act and laws related to classified documents.
Smith’s filing represents the most stark and high-stakes confrontation yet between the judge and the prosecutor, illustrating the extent to which a ruling by Cannon that legitimizes the PRA as a defense could eviscerate the historic case. It sets up the possibility that a government appeal of such a ruling could delay the trial well beyond November’s presidential election, in which Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee.
Last month, Cannon ordered defense lawyers and prosecutors in the case to submit hypothetical jury instructions based on two different, and very much contested, readings of the PRA.
In response, Smith said Cannon was pursuing a “fundamentally flawed legal premise” that the law somehow overrides Section 793 of the Espionage Act, which Trump is accused of violating by stashing hundreds of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home and private club, after his presidency ended.
“That legal premise is wrong, and a jury instruction for Section 793 that reflects that premise would distort the trial,” Smith wrote. The Presidential Records Act, he said, “should not play any role at trial at all.”
Updated
Donald Trump is well on his way to winning the Republican presidential nomination, after last night’s victories in four states’ primaries. The same can be said for Joe Biden, though the president is also dealing with a rebellion from groups upset at his support for Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Here’s more about what yesterday’s primary results tell us about the contours of the presidential race, from the Guardian’s Joan E Greve and Léonie Chao-Fong:
Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump won primary elections in four states, including the crucial battleground state of Wisconsin.
Hundreds of delegates were up for grabs in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York and Wisconsin on Tuesday, and Biden and Trump have already amassed enough delegates to win their respective nominations. But the turnout could provide more clues about the general election in November.
Voters also had a chance to register their discontent with the nominees. Connecticut and Rhode Island gave voters the opportunity to vote “uncommitted” in the primary, while Wisconsin offered a similar option of “uninstructed delegation”. Wisconsin Democrats will be closely watching the turnout for “uninstructed delegation” after progressive activists launched a campaign encouraging voters to withhold support from the US president to protest against his handling of the war in Gaza.
The Listen to Wisconsin campaign, based on similar efforts in states like Michigan and Minnesota, has attracted support from some rank-and-file union members as well as an influential group of low-wage and immigrant workers in the state.
There’s quite the swirl of legal entanglements surrounding Donald Trump’s foray into the media world. The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports that the former president has sued two former contestants from The Apprentice who became co-founders of Trump Media:
Donald Trump sued two former contestants on The Apprentice, his hit NBC reality show, who became co-founders of Trump Media and Technology Group, claiming they failed to set up the venture properly and should not get promised stock worth more than $400m.
Trump fronted The Apprentice, in which contestants competed for a job at the Trump Organization, from 2004 to 2015. The show coined Trump’s catchphrase, “You’re fired!”, though he ended up fired himself, after entering Republican presidential politics and making racist comments about Mexicans.
Wesley Moss and Andrew Litinsky met as Apprentice contestants in 2004. In 2021, after Trump was thrown off major social media platforms for inciting the January 6 Capitol attack, as he sought to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden, the two men pitched Trump on starting his own platform, which became Truth Social.
“This was a phenomenal opportunity for Moss and Litinsky,” said the suit filed by Trump in Florida in late March and first reported by Bloomberg News on Tuesday.
Though the two men were “riding President Trump’s coattails”, the suit said, “all [they] needed to do was diligently, faithfully and loyally execute on a short-term plan: get TMTG’s corporate governance established, get Truth Social ready to launch, and find a suitable special purpose acquisition company to take the new company public and access capital to advance TMTG’s business plan”.
Brothers plead guilty to insider trading charge connected to Trump media firm
Reuters reports that two men have entered guilty pleas today to an insider trading scheme connected to Donald Trump’s media company.
Here’s more, from Reuters:
Two men pleaded guilty on Wednesday to insider trading in securities in the company that ultimately took Donald Trump’s media business public.
Michael Shvartsman, 53, head of Miami-based venture capital firm Rocket One Capital, and his brother Gerald Shvartsman, 46, each pleaded guilty to one count of securities fraud before Lewis Liman, the US district judge, in Manhattan.
Rocket One’s chief investment officer, Bruce Garelick, is scheduled to face trial on related charges on 29 April.
Prosecutors charged the trio last year with illegally trading on inside information about Trump Media & Technology Group’s (TMTG) plan to go public through a merger with a blank-check company. TMTG operates Truth Social, Trump’s main social media platform.
Prosecutors said the trio signed confidentiality agreements in June 2021 when they were approached to become early investors in Digital World Acquisition, the blank-check company. The agreements required them to keep information they learned confidential and not trade the company’s securities in the open market, prosecutors said.
After hearing the company was in merger talks with TMTG, prosecutors said the trio tipped others and bought Digital World securities, selling them after the deal was announced on 20 October 2021, to make a total of $22m in illegal profit.
Speaking of Democrats and the Senate, the party is already expected to have a difficult time keeping their majority in Congress’s upper chamber in the November elections.
But one prominent political forecaster thinks the job is even more difficult than it appears. The Cook Political Report has moved the Nevada Senate seat represented by Jacky Rosen into its “toss up” column, from “lean Democratic”.
“We are moving this race because of the unique forces at play in Nevada. A combination of a newer electorate that Rosen must win over, Biden’s lagging numbers and the unique post-COVID economic hangover in Nevada make this race a Toss Up,” said Jessica Taylor, Cook’s Senate and governors editor.
Besides Nevada, which has voted Democratic in recent presidential elections but has seen the GOP make inroads lately, Democrats are defending Senate seats representing Ohio and Montana, both red states. The outcome of those races will likely decide Senate control, in addition to whether or not Joe Biden wins re-election.
Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee, did not quite tell NBC they agreed with growing calls for the supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor to retire, so Joe Biden can nominate a younger liberal replacement. But they nearly did.
“I’m very respectful of Justice Sotomayor,” Blumenthal said. “I have great admiration for her. But I think she really has to weigh the competing factors. We should learn a lesson. And it’s not like there’s any mystery here about what the lesson should be. The old saying – graveyards are full of indispensable people, ourselves in this body included.”
That lesson – a harsh one for anyone to contemplate – springs from the case of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the great liberal justice who declined to retire in 2014, when she was 81 and when Democrats held the White House and the Senate, then died in September 2020, at 87 and with Republicans in control.
That allowed Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell to ram through a hardline replacement, Amy Coney Barrett, and tilt the court firmly right, 6-3.
That court has issued major rulings including removing the federal right to abortion, striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions and loosening gun rights. Progressives fear more such rulings to come.
Sotomayor is 69 and suffers from diabetes. She recently remarked on feeling “tired” while “working harder than I ever had”.
Blumenthal said Sotomayor was “a highly accomplished and, obviously, fully functioning justice right now. Justices have to make their personal decisions about their health, and their level of energy, but also to keep in mind the larger national and public interest in making sure that the court looks and thinks like America.”
Whitehouse said he was “not joining any calls” for Sotomayor to step down. But he also offered a stark warning: “Run it to 7-2 and you go from a captured court to a full Maga court. Certainly I think if Justice Ginsburg had it to do over again, she might have re-thought her confidence in her own health.”
Sotomayor did not comment. Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, told NBC: “President Biden believes that decisions to retire from the supreme court should be made by the justices themselves and no one else.”
Voters in Oklahoma have kicked out a local official who has ties to white nationalist groups.
The Guardian’s Ed Helmore reports:
Voters in Enid, Oklahoma, have decisively kicked out a city council member with a history of ties to white nationalist groups from the elected body almost a year after he was admitted.
Judd Blevins lost his position as Enid’s ward 1 council member, according to Oklahoma’s state election board. The move comes months after Blevin was shown to have attended a deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and was later shown to have led an Oklahoma chapter of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa.
Blevins denied he was or ever had been a white supremacist, and said he was motivated by “the same issues that got Donald Trump elected in 2016”.
A small group of 36 Blevins supporters had won him election last year, but he lost Tuesday’s vote to fellow Republican candidate Cheryl Patterson who had campaigned on a platform of returning Enid to “normalcy” and appears to have defeated Blevins by a 20-point margin, or 268 votes.
For the full story, click here:
In a new interview on Jimmy Fallon, Hillary Clinton told voters who are upset over Joe Biden and Donald Trump being the two presidential choices to “get over yourself”.
Clinton, who ran against Trump in 2016, said:
“It’s kind of like, one is old and effective and compassionate, has a heart and really cares about people. And one is old and has been charged with 91 felonies.”
She went on to add:
“I don’t understand why this is even a hard choice. Really, I don’t understand it … Hopefully, people will realize what’s at stake because it’s an existential question. What kind of country we’re going to have? What kind of democracy we’re going to have. People who blow that off are not paying attention because it’s not like Trump, his enablers, his empowerers, his allies are not telling us what they want to do. I mean, they’re pretty clear about what kind of country they want.”
“Get over yourself.”
— The Recount (@therecount) April 3, 2024
ICYMI: Watch Hillary Clinton's message to voters who are upset that Biden and Trump are the two choices for president. pic.twitter.com/4n1LxAgTxh
Updated
Sherrod Brown’s campaign is celebrating a strong fundraising display, as the leftwing Democrat gears up for his Ohio re-election fight with the Trump-endorsed Republican Bernie Moreno, one of a number of contests expected to decide control of the Senate later this year.
Friends of Sherrod Brown, the three-term senator’s principal campaign committee, says it raised more than $12m in the first quarter of the year.
Rachel Petri, campaign manager for the group, said: “While Sherrod’s opponent makes it clear he’s only out for himself and is using his millions to try to buy Ohio’s Senate seat, Sherrod has unprecedented grassroots support behind his reelection campaign.
“Sherrod and Connie [Schultz, the senator’s wife] are thankful to every member of this movement working to send Sherrod back to the Senate to continue fighting for Ohioans and the dignity of work.”
Moreno made his millions in cars, then made his bones in Donald Trump’s Republican party by moving from the establishment to the populist right. His victory in the primary was not without its surprises. His campaign trail rhetoric is not without its questionable claims. Some further reading follows…
The day so far
Joe Biden spent the past month barnstorming swing states, while his campaign was busy staffing up, opening offices and reaching out to voters. Was it enough to boost his stubbornly low approval ratings, or help him overtake Donald Trump in the polls? A Wall Street Journal survey released today indicates it is not, with the president trailing his Republican challenger in six of the seven states seen as deciding the election – similar to other surveys taken in recent months showing Biden faring poorly against the candidate he bested in 2020. Perhaps more interesting is the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released today, which finds Americans largely agree on values, even if they are deeply divided over who they want as their leader.
Here’s what else is going on:
Trump held a rally in Michigan yesterday, where he told the crowd he had spoken to the family of a woman allegedly murdered by a man in the US illegally. But her relatives reportedly say none of them have spoken to the former president.
Robert F Kennedy, the anti-vaccine activist and independent presidential candidate, walked back a recent comment, where he said Biden was more of a threat to democracy than Trump.
Taiwan is recovering from the strongest earthquake to strike the island in 25 years, with the death toll climbing to nine. Follow our live blog for more on this developing story.
Trump Media went public last week, boosting the former president’s wealth as he deals with civil judgments and legal fees connected to his criminal indictments. But the business almost didn’t make it, and had to be rescued two years ago by a businessman with connections to Russia and a checkered past, the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports:
Donald Trump’s social media company Trump Media managed to go public last week only after it had been kept afloat in 2022 by emergency loans provided in part by a Russian-American businessman under scrutiny in a federal insider-trading and money-laundering investigation.
The former US president stands to gain billions of dollars – his stake is currently valued at about $4bn – from the merger between Trump Media and Technology Group and the blank-check company Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which took the parent company of Truth Social public.
But Trump Media almost did not make it to the merger after regulators opened a securities investigation into the merger in 2021 and caused the company to burn through cash at an extraordinary rate as it waited to get the green light for its stock market debut.
The situation led Trump Media to take emergency loans, including from an entity called ES Family Trust, which opened an account with Paxum Bank, a small bank registered on the Caribbean island of Dominica that is best known for providing financial services to the porn industry.
Through leaked documents, the Guardian has learned that ES Family Trust operated like a shell company for a Russian-American businessman named Anton Postolnikov, who co-owns Paxum Bank and has been a subject of a years-long joint federal criminal investigation by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into the Trump Media merger.
Independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr walks back saying Biden ‘much worse threat to democracy’ than Trump
Independent presidential candidate and anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy Jr made waves earlier this week when he said “I can make the argument that President Biden is the much worse threat to democracy” than Donald Trump.
Kennedy now appears to feel the comment went too far, and walked it back in an interview with NewsNation:
RFK Jr. walks back saying “I can make the argument that President Biden is a much worse threat to democracy” than Donald Trump:
— The Recount (@therecount) April 3, 2024
“I didn't say definitively. ... I don't believe either of them are going to destroy democracy.” pic.twitter.com/FhCkbsJtzZ
Here’s more on Kennedy, and his insurgent candidacy that could complicate both Trump and Joe Biden’s prospects in crucial states:
Shifting now to a completely different country, Taiwan is recovering from the strongest earthquake to hit the island in 25 years.
We have a live blog dedicated to covering this developing story, and you can read it here:
Americans may not be able to agree on who they want as president, but an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released today shows they generally agree on what it means to be a citizen of the country.
The major area of disagreement is over the right to bear arms, the survey finds. It also shows a worryingly small number of people believe the country’s democracy is functioning well.
But the rest of the findings are comparatively reassuring. Here’s more, from the AP:
The poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that about 9 in 10 U.S. adults say the right to vote, the right to equal protection under the law and the right to privacy are extremely important or very important to the United States’ identity as a nation. The survey also found that 84% feel the same way about the freedom of religion.
The results, which included perspectives on a number of different freedoms and rights, have only small variances between Republicans and Democrats except on the right to bear arms, which Republicans are more likely to see as core to the nation’s identity. The overall findings are striking because they come at a time of extreme partisanship when political agreements seem rare and concerns are heightened over the potential for violence during a volatile presidential election year.
“If you get a bunch of normal people at random and put them in a room together and chat about issues, there’s a lot more convergence than you might imagine,” said Michael Albertus, a political science professor at the University of Chicago.
A more pessimistic assessment of the country was reflected in another finding — that only about 3 in 10 Americans believe the nation’s democracy is functioning well. About half say the U.S. is a poorly functioning democracy, while 14% say the U.S. is not a democracy.
The tension between the broad consensus on the country’s fundamental values and discontent with how well its form of government is working is not a surprise, experts say.
“Part of it is really our leaders are not reflecting the electorate, and they behave in a way that’s much more polarized than what the electorate is,” said Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University.
Another poll released today from Gallup shows that about a third of Americans each think only Donald Trump, or only Joe Biden, would perform well as president.
As for the remaining third, they believe neither man will do a good job, Gallup finds.
As you can see from the precise breakdown, Trump has the slight edge in this survey, with 35% preferring only him, compared with 30% for Biden. The group that likes neither man comes in at 29%.
Perhaps most relevant to Biden’s re-election prospects is the poll’s finding that those who say only Biden would make a good president is six percentage points lower than it was in 2020, while the other metrics are about the same.
Updated
Donald Trump is once again under a gag order, this time in his New York criminal case over making hush money payments. But will it matter? The Guardian’s Cameron Joseph reports that it probably will not, at least when it comes to the topic of death threats. Here’s what he has to say in the Trump on Trial newsletter, which you can sign up for here:
When Judge Juan Merchan issued a gag order last week to bar former president Donald Trump from attacking potential witnesses and others involved in his pending hush-money trial in New York, he left open a loophole that Trump jumped to exploit.
The former president immediately went on the attack against Merchan’s own daughter, falsely accusing her of posting social media content that called for Trump to be jailed.
Merchan’s original gag order had covered potential trial witnesses, jurors, district attorney Alvin Bragg’s staff and Merchan’s staff while excluding the prosecutor and the judge – but hadn’t explicitly included Merchan’s and Bragg’s family members.
Merchan responded by expanding the gag order on Monday to cover their families, writing that Trump’s attacks on his daughter were part of a broader pattern of attacking family members of the judges and attorneys involved in his cases that “serves no legitimate purpose. It merely injects fear in those assigned or called to participate in the proceedings, that not only they, but their family members as well, are ‘fair game’ for Defendant’s vitriol.”
That pattern has played out in case after case – and if the past is prologue, his supporters will take it one step further. When Trump attacks those involved in his cases, death threats soon follow.
Donald Trump also campaigned yesterday in Grand Rapids, Michigan, bringing his anti-immigrant message to a city where an undocumented man is accused of murder.
During his speech, the former president said he had spoken to “some of [the] family” of murder victim Ruby Garcia. Local broadcaster WOOD reports that did not happen. Here’s more:
“He did not speak with any of us, so it was kind of shocking seeing that he had said that he had spoke with us, and misinforming people on live TV,” Ruby Garcia’s sister, Mavi Garcia, told Target 8.
Mavi Garcia, the family spokesperson, said neither Trump nor anybody from his campaign has contacted her or anybody in her immediate family. She said her family is close and she would know if that had happened.
“It was shocking. I kind of stopped watching it. I’d only seen up to that, after I heard a couple of misinformations he said, I just stopped watching it,” Mavi Garcia said.
Trump spent some of his speech on Tuesday focusing on immigration, turning to the March 22 murder of 25-year-old Ruby Garcia. Court records show Brandon Ortiz-Vite, who was in the U.S. illegally, has confessed to killing her and dumping her along US-131 in Grand Rapids.
Donald Trump has lately been doing some campaigning of his own, including yesterday in Wisconsin, where the Guardian’s Alice Herman reports he held a rally and railed against undocumented migrants:
On Wisconsin’s presidential primary election day, Donald Trump made his first campaign stop in the state, where he railed against so-called “migrant crime” and doubled down on false election claims.
“We won in 2016 – we did much better in 2020, hate to say it, we did a hell of a lot better,” the former president told the roaring crowd, nodding to the disproven and unfounded “rigging” numerous times during his speech.
“We will throw out the sick political class that hates us,” he continued later. “We will route the fake news media, we will drain the swamp and we will liberate our country from these tyrants and villains once and for all.”
Hours earlier, the rainy weather in Green Bay had turned sludgy, icy and painful as gusts of wind blew the precipitation sideways. It did not stop thousands of Trump supporters from thronging there for hours, forming a parade that snaked up and away from the venue and over the bridge crossing the Fox River two blocks away.
Trump is, according to most polling, fighting for his life in Wisconsin, a state he lost to Joe Biden four years ago. But one would never know that in the KI Convention Center, where his red and white and sequined supporters gathered to hear him speak for the first time this campaign season.
“I personally like that he’s unashamed,” said Ethan Nielsen, an 18-year-old who attended the rally with his father as he waited in line. “He believes what he believes and he doesn’t go back on what he says.”
Biden campaign touts busy March spent engaging voters, raising funds
The Biden campaign is out with its own data today about what they’re calling the “I’m On Board” Month of Action in March, which they spent fundraising, opening up offices and hiring staff.
“Our campaign is making early investments to connect directly with voters on the issues that will define this election and to build the infrastructure we need to win,” Biden-Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a press release.
“The difference between our ground game and Donald Trump’s nonexistent presence in the battleground states couldn’t be more clear – and the failing Trump campaign and the RNC can’t get this time back.”
Their accomplishments include opening up more than 100 offices, sending more than 2m text message and making 385,000 calls, and Joe Biden’s campaigning in all of this year’s swing states in the weeks since his State of the Union address.
Biden campaign's hopes for turnaround hampered by new poll showing Trump leading in swing states
Good morning, US politics blog readers. Joe Biden has been an unpopular president for most of his administration, and recent polls have shown him trailing Donald Trump in states he must win in order to remain in the White House. Many Democrats have hoped recent weeks would mark a turnaround for the president, who gave a well-received State of the Union address, and then held fundraisers and campaigned in swing states across the country. But new polling from the Wall Street Journal indicates those efforts have not changed the dynamics of the race yet. Biden is behind Trump in six of the seven crucial swing states – most of which he carried in 2020.
Democrats have repeatedly been rocked by such polls in recent months, and hoped that as it becomes clear the November election is set to be a rematch between Trump and Biden, voters will shift their support to the president. We’ll see what they have to say about these latest findings.
Here’s what else is going on today:
The president said he was “outraged and heartbroken” over the deaths of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in an Israeli strike in Gaza. Follow our live blog for the latest on this story.
Trump and Biden swept their respective primaries in four battleground states last night, though some Democratic voters used the ballot to express their opposition to the president’s support for Israel.
The White House press briefing is scheduled for 1.30pm ET.
