Erick Erickson@EWErickson
12h
Dems: Vance is weird.
GOP: people can’t afford groceries and all you’ve got is name calling.
No wonder they're all against gender affirming care. If you can change that easily, who the hell needs a doctor and their fancy hormone treatments?
Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund will fund a grassroots organizing program aimed at winning the White House and Congress for Democrats.
The political arm of Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun regulation group founded by former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, plans to spend $45 million over the coming months to elect favored candidates in eight of the states that could determine control of the White House, House, Senate and local offices.
The effort will include a new student organizing drive, with plans to hire 30 new organizers for volunteer recruitment drives at 32 college and university campuses in Arizona, California, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, New York, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The group’s leaders said the effort will focus on younger voters, voters of color and suburban women, with new field offices in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
“With MAGA Republicans pushing an extreme ‘guns everywhere’ agenda, this election is a life-or-death moment — so Everytown is going all-out to mobilize the majority of Americans who want to live free from the fear of gun violence,” Everytown for Gun Safety president John Feinblatt said in a statement. “From sending Vice President Harris to the Oval Office to helping our own volunteers win office, we’ll elect gun sense champions up and down the ballot.”
The group — along with its grassroots networks, Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action — endorsed Harris for president last week.
About 80 percent of the $45 million will go to television and digital advertising, according to a person familiar with the spending who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The full list of candidates that the money will support will be determined over the coming weeks. Some of the money is expected to support local candidates Everytown has recruited through its “Demand a Seat” program, which encourages activists and survivors of gun violence to run for public office.
Bloomberg, one of the biggest donors to Democratic politics, gave $19 million this year to Future Forward, a super PAC supporting Harris, and nearly $1 million to the coordinated Democratic presidential campaign, which at the time was supporting President Biden before he left the presidential race. Bloomberg remains a donor to Everytown, but the group also raises money from its grassroots efforts.
Everytown announced a $60 million spending plan before the 2020 election aimed at defeating then-President Donald Trump and electing more Democrats who support gun regulations.
On Friday, speaking to Christians at the Turning Point Action Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump begged the members of the audience to “vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what: it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine…. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”
The comment drew a lot of attention, and on Monday, Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham gave him a chance to walk the statement back. Instead, he said: “I said, vote for me, you’re not going to have to do it ever again. It’s true.” “Don’t worry about the future. You have to vote on November 5. After that, you don’t have to worry about voting anymore. I don’t care, because we’re going to fix it. The country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote anymore, because frankly we will have such love, if you don’t want to vote anymore, that’s OK.”
Trump’s refusal to disavow the idea that putting him back into power will mean the end of a need for elections is chilling and must be viewed against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s July 1, 2024, decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States. In that decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court’s right-wing majority said that presidents cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of a president’s “official duties” and that presidents should have a presumption of immunity for other presidential actions.
John Roberts defends the idea of a strong executive and has fought against the expansion of voting rights made possible by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The idea that it is dangerous to permit minorities and women to vote suggests that there are certain people who should run the country. That tracks with a recently unearthed video in which Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance calls childless people “psychotic” and “deranged,” and refers unselfconsciously to “America’s leadership class.”
The idea that democracy must be overturned in order to enable a small group of leaders to restore virtue to a nation is at the center of the “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy” championed by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. Orbán’s imposition of an authoritarian Christian nationalism on a former democracy, in turn, has inspired the far-right figures that are currently in charge of the Republican Party. As Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts put it: “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”
Kevin Roberts has called for “institutionalizing Trumpism” and pulled together dozens of right-wing institutions behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to create a blueprint for a second Trump term. Those who created Project 2025 are closely connected to the Trump team, and Trump praised its creators and its ideas.
Today, The New Republic published the foreword Vance wrote for Kevin Roberts’s forthcoming book. Vance makes it clear he sees Kevin Roberts and himself as working together to create “a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics.” Like others on the Christian right, Vance argues that “the Left” has captured the country’s institutions and that those institutions must be uprooted and those in them replaced with right-wing Christians in order to restore what they see—inaccurately—as traditional America.
That determination to disrupt American institutions fits neatly with the technology entrepreneurs who seem to believe that they are the ones who should control the nation’s future. Vance is backed by Silicon Valley libertarian Peter Thiel, who put more than $10 million behind Vance’s election to the Senate. In 2009, Thiel wrote “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
“The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics,” he wrote. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
Thiel set Vance up to invest in companies that made him wealthy and touted Vance for the vice presidential slot, and in turn, the Silicon Valley set are expecting Vance to help get rid of the regulation imposed by the Biden administration and to push cryptocurrency. Trump appears to be getting on board with comments about how the tech donors are “geniuses,” praising investor Elon Musk and saying, “We have to make life good for our smart people.” In a piece that came out Sunday, Washington Post reporters Elizabeth Dwoskin, Cat Zakrzewski, Nitasha Tiku, and Josh Dawsey credited the influence of Thiel and other tech leaders for turning Vance from a Never-Trumper to a MAGA Republican.
Judd Legum of Popular Information reported today that the cryptocurrency industry is investing heavily in the 2024 election, with its main super PAC raising $202 million in this cycle. Three large cryptocurrency companies are investing about $150 million in pro-crypto congressional candidates.
On Saturday, Trump said he would make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world.” He promised to end regulations on cryptocurrency, which, because it is not overseen by governments, is prone to use by criminals and rogue states. That regulation is “a part of a much larger pattern that’s being carried out by the same left-wing fascists to weaponize government against any threat to their power,” Trump said. “They’ve done it to me.”
But the problem that those trying to get rid of the modern administrative state continue to run up against is that voters actually like a government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights. In recent days, Minnesota governor Tim Walz has been articulating how popular that government is as he makes the television rounds.
On Sunday, CNN’s Jake Tapper listed some of Walz’s policies—he passed background checks for guns, expanded LGBTQ protections, instituted free breakfast and lunch for school kids—and asked if they made Walz vulnerable to Trump calling him a “big government liberal.” Walz joked that he was, indeed, a “monster.”
“Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn, and women are making their own health care decisions, and we’re a top five business state, and we also rank in the top three of happiness…. The fact of the matter is,” where Democratic policies are implemented, “quality of life is higher, the economies are better…educational attainment is better. So yeah, my kids are going to eat here, and you’re going to have a chance to go to college, and you’re going to have an opportunity to live where we're working on reducing carbon emissions. Oh, and by the way, you’re going to have personal incomes that are higher, and you’re going to have health insurance. So if that’s where they want to label me, I’m more than happy to take the label.”
The extremes of Project 2025 have made it clear that the Republicans intend to destroy the kind of government Walz is defending and replace it with an authoritarian president imposing Christian nationalism. And when Americans hear what’s in Project 2025, they overwhelmingly oppose it. Trump has tried without success to distance himself from the document.
He and his team have also hammered on the Heritage Foundation for their public revelations of their plans, and today the director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, stepped down. The Trump campaign issued a statement reiterating—in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary—that Trump had nothing to do with Project 2025 and adding: “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should service as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you.”
The Harris campaign responded to the news by saying that “Project 2025 is on the ballot because Donald Trump is on the ballot. This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country. Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real—in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding.”
The reasoning behind the idea of a strong executive, or a “leadership class” that does not have to answer to voters, is that an extremist minority needs to take control of the American government away from the American people because the majority doesn’t like the policies the extremists want.
When Trump begs right-wing Christians to turn out for just one more election, he is promising that if only we will put him into the White House once and for all, we will never again have to worry about having a say in our government. As Trump put it: “The country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote anymore.”
The Houthi militia, born in the wilds of northwestern Yemen, has been wanting a war with Israel for decades. Its distinctive five-line motto, printed on flags and chanted at rallies by the group’s faithful, includes the lines “Death to Israel” and “Curses on the Jews.”
The Houthis got their wish on July 19, when one of their drones struck a high-rise in Tel Aviv, killing one man and wounding four others. The blast signaled a troubling new reality: Already embattled with Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north, Israel is now fighting yet another Islamist group, one that has succeeded—however modestly—in penetrating its fabled air defenses.
The Houthis are not a threat just to Israel, which promptly retaliated with air strikes on a Houthi-controlled Red Sea port. They have grown steadily more dangerous and volatile in recent months. They have maintained and even stepped up their attacks against commercial shipping in the Red Sea—ostensibly in support of Gaza—despite a large-scale U.S.-military effort to stop them. In a dramatic video that surfaced on July 20, Ukrainian guards on the deck of a container ship in the Red Sea fired at an unmanned “suicide boat” streaming toward them, until it exploded in a ball of fire. The top U.S. commander in the Middle East recently issued an alarming report saying that the military effort to constrain the Houthis is failing and must be expanded.
The group, which seized the capital city of Sana’a a decade ago, has also made warlike gestures closer to home, arresting scores of people who work for the United Nations and other organizations in Yemen in recent weeks, and opening violent skirmishes with rivals in the country’s south. In mid-July, it got Saudi Arabia to make a humiliating retreat in a financial-sanctions dispute by threatening to attack it.
All of this has set back long-standing efforts to reach a regional peace deal between the Houthis and their neighbors, according to Tim Lenderking, the U.S. special envoy for Yemen. “Pressure is building to designate the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization,” Lenderking told me. The U.S. government currently categorizes the Houthis at a lower level of terrorist activity; designating them as a foreign terrorist organization, as the Trump administration did, would have serious consequences for them, including heavier sanctions.
The Gaza war has been a great boon to the Houthis, who had been facing some domestic resistance before it broke out. The Houthis’ staunch public support for Gaza has helped them recruit new soldiers at home and maintain their immense popularity across the Arab world. That popularity has translated into much-needed financial contributions (though not nearly enough to meet the needs of the Yemeni people).
The Houthis’ rise to power has been so swift that it is still baffling, even to Yemenis. Twenty years ago, they were an obscure rebel group in Yemen’s remote northwest, fueled by feelings of historic entitlement and oppression. They took advantage of their enemies’ corruption and ineptitude and cannily allied with Iran, which has provided essential weapons and military training.
But the group’s power is partly a measure of its neighbors’ extreme vulnerability. One successful missile strike on a Dubai hotel or a Riyadh conference center is a devastating reputational blow, worth billions of dollars in lost business and tourist revenue. The Houthis have no such worries; they are accustomed to being bombed, and revel in martyrdom. They are also used to living in caves.
Only a few months ago, United Nations negotiators were voicing guarded optimism that if the Gaza war wound down, they could finalize a deal to end the conflict between the Houthis and their Saudi neighbors, which started in 2015. (The fighting has mostly been on hold since the parties reached a truce two years ago.)
That diplomatic effort, known as the “road map,” would provide incentives for the Houthis to find a modus vivendi with their rivals in southern Yemen, where the officially recognized (but very weak) Yemeni government is based. The road map would also provide money to help ease the suffering of the Yemeni people, who are heavily dependent on dwindling supplies of food aid from abroad.
But the road map threatened to reward the Houthis with legitimacy and large new revenue streams at the very moment when they were effectively blocking the waterway that carries 15 percent of the world’s trade. Maritime traffic through the Red Sea has dropped by almost 80 percent since the Houthis began attacking ships last November, and that was before they struck Tel Aviv on July 19, prompting the Israelis to bomb the city of Hodeida, on the Red Sea coast. Traffic has fallen further since.
The Houthis also appear to be evading international efforts to stop them from importing weapons. The British ambassador to the United Nations said in May that there has been a surge since October in vessels entering Houthi ports without submitting to required inspections. They’ve been using ever more sophisticated weapons since they started attacking ships in the Red Sea last year, and the situation could get worse. American intelligence officials have warned that Russia may arm the Houthis with advanced anti-ship missiles, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, in retaliation for Ukraine strikes, using American weapons, on targets inside Russia.
With the road map on hold, Yemen’s internationally recognized government, based in the southern port city of Aden, began making efforts in recent months to weaken the Houthis by cutting off their access to the international banking system. But the Aden-based government has no money and is utterly dependent on the Saudis. In July, the Houthis threatened to attack the Saudis if they did not put an end to the financial sanctions, and the Saudis quickly caved. The pattern has repeated itself again and again in recent years.
The Houthis have also been reorganizing the government they inherited when they took control of northern Yemen a decade ago, often in ways that suggest warlike intent. They have created a “general mobilization” force that appears to be modeled on the Basij, Iran’s youth paramilitary force, I was told by Mohammed Albasha, an analyst with Navanti, an international research and security company. “They are all trained to fight both domestic and foreign enemies, and to conduct surveillance—even on their neighbors, tribes, and friends,” he said.
Where all this militancy will end is anyone’s guess. The Houthi leaders are isolated and inscrutable. One thing is beyond doubt: Their successful drone strike on Israel was a dream come true, and they seem reluctant to trade their militancy for desperately needed money. Their leader, Abdelmalik al Houthi, declared in a speech last week: “We have been very happy” to be involved directly in a war with Israel and the United States.
PHOENIX — A top Republican election official in Arizona’s most populous county known for his vigorous defense of elections lost his primary election Tuesday to a state lawmaker who called elections in the county “a laughingstock.”
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, who faced death threats and endless harassment for doing his job, lost his reelection bid to state Rep. Justin Heap, an attorney aligned with the state legislature’s ultraconservative Freedom Caucus. Heap has voted for legislation that grew out of false election theories and was endorsed by Kari Lake, the Senate candidate with a large following who routinely spreads misinformation about elections and has been highly critical of Richer.
As Heap campaigned for the job, he pledged to try to improve confidence in elections and engage with the public in a respectful manner.
“It has become clear that ensuring the right of every citizen to have confidence in their vote, regardless of party, has become the civil rights issue of our time,” Heap said during a June debate. “Unfortunately, our current county recorder has taken a different path, a path that disrespects and demeans the voters. A path that attacks anyone who criticizes his office and laughs off even the suggestion that there might be anything wrong with our election system.”
Richer congratulated Heap on his win Wednesday morning, writing on X: “Elections have winners and, sadly, losers. And in this one, it looks like I’m going to end up on the losing side of the column. But that’s the name of the game. Accept it. Move on.”
In the November general election, Heap will face Democrat Tim Stringham, a U.S. Army and Navy veteran and political newcomer who is campaigning on a promise to “safeguard our elections” and “ensure that each eligible citizen gets to vote in a safe, secure and convenient way and that each vote will be counted fairly and transparently.”
If Heap wins in November, he could dramatically reshape how elections are run in the county, a fiercely contested battleground where former president Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election four years ago inspired profound mistrust among many Republicans about elections and government institutions. That movement sparked a rush of new involvement and activated pro-Trump voters determined to oust local officials who defend election results they don’t like, including Richer and members of the county governing board. Richer will continue to help run the upcoming presidential election, then leave office next year.
When Trump narrowly lost to President Biden in Arizona in 2020, he and his supporters quickly hyper-focused on Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and more than half of the swing state’s voters. Through emissaries, phone calls and text message, they sought to halt vote-counting and then tried to undermine the results. Republicans on the county board of supervisors who signed off on the results faced death threats and were called treasonous. A mob of protesters showed up at the home of one supervisor. Soon after, Richer took office.
Of the three remaining Republicans who were on the board in 2020, two decided not to run for reelection and a third lost his primary on Tuesday. The Republicans running for those seats have said they would work to make elections more transparent. One of those Republicans, Trump-endorsed Rep. Debbie Lesko, voted against accepting the 2020 election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania on Jan. 6, 2021. Another has advocated for getting rid of precinct-based voting and emergency ballot drop boxes.
Republican county attorney Rachel Mitchell, who has told members of her own party that Biden won the 2020 vote and that the 2022 elections in the state were accurate and legitimate, easily won her race against a farther-right candidate. And a GOP supervisor who joined the board after the 2020 election and was called a “traitor” for defending the validity of electoral outcomes won his reelection. The general election race for county recorder is expected to be competitive, political analysts say.
Richer and the Republican supervisors shared election responsibilities and generally shared a similar vision on how voting should be run, how votes should be counted and how election employees should be defended. New leaders could take the county in a radically different direction.
Richer was endorsed by several traditional Republicans, including former governors Doug Ducey and Jan Brewer.
“For being the ‘establishment candidate,’ having the county party, the state party, Turning Point USA, Lake-world, Trump-world all against me — that’s hard to run against,” Richer said in an interview shortly before results began posting.
Richer, an attorney, assumed the once-sleepy job of helping run elections and recording documents in 2021, after he beat the Democratic incumbent in the 2020 election. He stepped into the job as Trump, his allies and supporters tried to overturn the former president’s 10,457-vote defeat and then turned against county and state Republicans who refused. Richer had nothing to do with the administration of that presidential election but took heat for it, anyway.
In that environment, Richer began sharing his view from inside of the recorder’s office in downtown Phoenix in the hopes of making it easier to understand complex voting rules and procedures.
Like an FAQ come to life, Richer threw himself into trying to make elections less mysterious, blasting out social media posts that fact-checked people who amplified misinformation — treating everyday constituents and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, all the same. Richer gave tours of the county’s vote-county operation, taking the curious into the bowels of the process and explaining how he kept voter rolls updated.
His approach drew praise from national election officials but ire from farther-right Republicans who viewed him as dismissive of their concerns. Richer found himself in the eye of attacks after the 2022 midterm general election, when printer malfunctions at dozens of voting sites caused confusion and inconvenienced some voters. Lake, who lost her campaign for governor that year by about 17,000 votes, falsely claimed that Richer deliberately rigged the election to prevent her from winning. Death threats and harassment followed.
In a rare move, Richer sued Lake for defamation in June 2023, saying he saw a direct link between her rhetoric and threats against him. Lake has declined to defend herself against the lawsuit and asked a judge to begin the process of assessing damages.
Christine Jones, a Republican attorney and former GOP candidate who closely follows the state’s elections, said two things weighed against Richer with primary voters.
“His tone: He’s a little sarcastic and a little snarky and some of that is defensive because he was attacked and had death threats,” she said. “The second thing: He sued Kari Lake for defamation, which had the effect of pitting more than half of Republican primary voters against him.”
As he ran for reelection, Richer campaigned at events hosted by grass-roots Republicans — the type of forums his GOP colleagues at the county stopped attending after they gave way to shouting by those who wanted confrontations. Richer himself was sometimes heckled or booed. In March, a vice chair of the Maricopa County Republican Committee told a crowd that she would “lynch” Richer if he walked in the room. She later described her comment as a joke.
In the final stretch of the campaign, Richer handed his GOP rivals a gift, telling reporters that he would vote for President Biden, not Trump, in November. His comments came before Biden’s June 27 shaky debate performance and eventual withdrawal from the race.
“DID YOU KNOW that the current fake-Republican County Recorder, Stephen Richer, has admitted he’s voting for Joe Biden,” Heap wrote on X on June 28. He continued, “Say NO to Stephen Richer & Joe Biden’s epic failures.”
Gordon Brown - Opinion
Asked why millions of News Group emails were deleted, Washington Post publisher Will Lewis pointed the finger at me
Blazoned across the top of every edition of the Washington Post is the statement “Democracy dies in darkness”. But what if the publisher himself is a master of the dark arts? I experienced, at first-hand, the journalistic techniques that the Washington Post’s publisher and chief executive, Sir William Lewis, and his colleagues used when working for the Murdoch media group and the Daily Telegraph in the UK.
Lewis and Robert Winnett, who was appointed by Lewis as editor of the Washington Post before quickly deciding not to take the job, are accused of benefiting from private investigators who broke the law. As these allegations surface, an “alternative truth” is being briefed that the Lewis team represents a nimble “no-holds-barred” British journalism, in contrast to what is alleged to have been the plodding, loss-making reporting of newspapers such as the recent Washington Post. It is Lewis’s claim that he can turn round the fortunes of the publication, which lost $77m last year, that appears to have endeared him to the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, who is the paper’s owner. But as recent revelations demonstrate, the real dividing line is not between the disrupter and an entrenched resistance to change, but between ethics and the lack of them.
I have only recently discovered how Lewis attempted to accuse me of a crime I did not commit. He was asked by the Metropolitan police why, in 2010-2011, News Group had ordered the deletion of millions of emails. These were emails that the police authorities thought may be relevant to their investigations into phone hacking. The Murdoch group continues to claim that emails were deleted “for commercial, IT and practical reasons”. But when the police confronted Lewis about the deletion of emails, including those of the then chief executive, Rebekah Brooks – despite the Met having requested them to be retained – it was a different story, which gave the game away.
His explanation conceded that emails were being destroyed to prevent them being seen. In an interview with the authorities on 8 July 2011, he tried to blame me by explaining to the police that he had been told that I, with Tom Watson, also an MP at that time, was conspiring to steal these emails. The Murdoch team implied I had bribed one of their former employees to do so, and indeed that we already had some of the documents. “We got a warning from a source that a current member of staff had got access to Rebekah’s emails,” Lewis told the police. “Then the source came back and said … emails had definitely been passed … she went into a panic.” This operation to steal, according to the source, “was controlled by Gordon Brown”. According to an email chain, which had been sent on 24 January 2011, the supposed thief had “met with Brown”.
None of this was anything other than a complete fabrication. The senior police officer Sue Akers, who headed the initial investigation, has now said she finds Lewis’s explanation to be unbelievable.
Having presented this new evidence to the Metropolitan police in May, I have been informed that the Met’s special inquiry team, which sits under the central specialist crime command, will look into this further. (News UK has responded that “it is strongly denied that News International sought to impede or worse conceal evidence from the Met investigation”.)
While Lewis has always claimed that he was Mr Clean Up, these new allegations point to a cover-up. The destroyed emails were likely to have revealed much more of News Group’s intrusion into the private lives of thousands of innocent people, not least ordinary families hit by tragedy, and almost certainly would have added to what I have only recently discovered about what happened to me.
I have known for some time that the Murdoch group had accessed information about my mortgage from my building society, had reverse engineered my telephone number, had faked my voice to secure personal information about me from my lawyer, and had paid an investigator to break into the police national computer to find out what personal information about me was available. I knew, too, that my tax returns had fallen into other hands, and that my medical records had been accessed (a doctor admitted to doing so), but to this day I do not know who was ultimately responsible for these thefts.
More recently, I have been given information alleging that the Murdoch group also paid investigators to break into other personal accounts of mine – including bank, gas and electricity – suggesting that nothing was out of bounds (in response, the Sunday Times said it “cannot comment on the specifics of these new allegations” but “rejects the accusation that it has in the past retained or commissioned any individual to act illegally”). The Murdoch team has always claimed that the pursuit – not just of me but my family, too – was in the public interest, but it is now clear to me that these were “fishing expeditions” to obtain personal and private information. So this was not merely a defensible lapse of judgment, but an indefensible breach of the law.
And what lay behind the extreme lengths to which Murdoch’s News Group went to subvert the law? It went far beyond a journalistic desire to publish a series of sensational stories. The Murdoch group not only had political motives but commercial designs that went far beyond trying to obtain 100% control of Sky TV. At various times, it planned to buy ITV, and to neuter the BBC (for example by cutting the licence fee, ending its website, taking away national sporting events from free to air coverage). The evidence suggests that the Murdoch empire also wanted to control much of the highly profitable UK telecoms industry, all of which the Conservatives were ready to go along with until the Milly Dowler scandal made it politically impossible.
Marching under the banner of a free press, Murdoch’s News Group violated individuals’ rights to a private life on an industrial scale, from the families of Milly Dowler and Madeleine McCann to the July 2005 bombing victims, intruding on them at their time of greatest grief and heartache. And, as we know from this week’s court proceedings, there is evidence that this went a step further with a cover-up, now exposed as breathtaking in its reach and intensity. We count on our journalists to shed light on the darkest of areas – to awe us with novel reporting, not commit groundbreaking crimes of their own. During these challenging times for print journalism, the answer to any paper’s financial woes is not to operate at the edge of the law, but to follow a clear moral compass. For without ethics, the truth will never shine through the darkness.
Exclusive: Scotland Yard move on complaint by ex-PM Gordon Brown, who accuses Will Lewis of phone hacking ‘cover-up’ in 2011
A British police special enquiry team is examining allegations that Will Lewis, now the chief executive of the Washington Post, presided over the deliberate destruction of emails at Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper business when he worked for the company 13 years ago.
The Met has told the former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown that its standing unit responsible for high-profile cases is reviewing a complaint he had submitted about Lewis after fresh disclosures emerged during civil actions relating to the phone-hacking scandal.
The letter, seen by the Guardian, is signed by the Met’s most senior officer, Mark Rowley, and tells Brown: “Please be assured that the contents of your letter, dated 2 May 2024, is being considered by the Met’s special enquiry team.”
The police chief adds: “The issues you raise are complex and will take time to consider against investigations that have already taken place.”
[... ... ...]
Civil actions relating to alleged phone hacking have been running in the English courts for more than a decade. Murdoch’s News Group has paid out hundreds of millions and settled more than 1,300 lawsuits relating to hacking at the now-closed News of the World, but always rejected allegations of wrongdoing at the Sun.
[...]
A spokesperson for Murdoch’s News UK said that Brown had only seen “partial information” from the civil cases and “does not have access to all material including detailed statements served by the defence”.
They added: “He is seeking to persuade the Met to take sides in a public debate.”
It was “strongly denied” that News International “sought to impede or worse conceal evidence from the Met” by deleting emails, the spokesperson added.
They cited a Crown Prosecution Service statement from December 2015, which said: “There is no evidence to suggest that email deletion was undertaken in order to pervert the course of justice.”
Yesterday, from a Harris campaign event in Atlanta, Georgia, Atlanta reporter Tariro Mzezewa noted that the crowd of 10,000 people “was ecstatic. There was chanting, cheering, singing, and dancing for hours in the lead-up to and throughout the event,” Mzezewa wrote today in Slate.
Mzezewa reported that rapper Megan Thee Stallion told the audience “I know my ladies in the crowd love their body. And if you want to keep loving your body, you know who to vote for,” before performing her hit “Body.” Georgia Democratic politicians showed up in force: voting rights advocate and former state representative Stacey Abrams, senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, state Democratic Party chair Representative Nikema Williams, and Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens.
“What you’re seeing is very real,” Mzezewa wrote, and she quoted an attendee who said: “it’s nice to witness history, but getting to be a part of it from the ground up is a whole other level.” Certainly, the grassroots enthusiasm for Harris’s presidential candidacy is palpable. More and more self-identified groups are launching fundraising calls for Harris; yesterday the Latter-day Saints for Harris—Mormons—announced that they, too, are “putting [their] shoulders to the wheel!” Today the executive board of the United Auto Workers also endorsed Harris.
At last night’s event, Vice President Harris noted that Trump has pulled out of the September debate to which he had previously agreed. “Here’s the funny thing about that,” she said. “He won’t debate, but he and his running mate sure seem to have a lot to say about me,” After hitting the campaign’s refrain that marks MAGA Republican behavior as “weird,” she added to applause: “Well, Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage because, as the saying goes, if you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.”
Trump did not say it to her face, but today he unloaded spectacularly on three Black female interviewers at a meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in Chicago.
When ABC News senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott began the interview by quoting a number of his racist statements about Black Americans and asking why, given that history, Black voters should trust him, he lost it. “I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner,” he began. “You don’t even say ‘Hello, how are you?’ Are you with ABC? Because I think they’re a fake news network, a terrible network.”
He went on to try to dominate Scott, listing the policies he claimed to have put into place, and to attack the people who organized the event before saying, “I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln. That’s my answer…. And for you to start off a question and answer period…in such a hostile manner, I think it’s a disgrace.”
As the session began, so it continued, with Trump questioning Harris’s Black identity—while also mispronouncing her name—and warning the attendees that they need “to stop people from invading our country that are…taking Black jobs.” NBC News correspondent Yamiche Alcindor told MSNBC that during the interview, “people were stunned, people were gasping, there were some people who were shouting back at him saying ‘That's a lie!’” Attendees laughed and jeered at Trump throughout the 37-minute session; his handlers made him leave early.
Scott accurately summed up Trump’s long history of racism, but lately he has been advertising it. In an interview with Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham aired last night, Trump said that Harris would be “like a play toy” for world leaders. “They look at her and they say we can’t believe we got so lucky. They’re gonna walk all over her.” “I don’t want to say as to why,” he said to the camera, “but a lot of people understand it.”
It is unlikely that his insults and naked racism will appeal to anyone but his base, making his performance, as Jessica Tarlov put it on the Fox News Channel, “a complete, absolute dumpster fire.” It is possible that Trump has lost the ability to read a room and reassure his audience that he’s a good bet. But it is also possible that Trump cannot bear to see the enthusiasm building behind Harris, not only because of its electoral meaning, but also because it reveals how small his own following is and how much people loathe him.
Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who produces wonderful video threads of important events, “put together an 11-minute supercut of Trump angrily self-immolating at the NABJ before his handlers pulled him from the stage.”
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo analyzed Trump’s meltdown in Chicago this way: “I think we’re getting the first view of imploding Donald Trump as he realizes that what was his for the taking ten days ago is slipping away and he’s likely to go to prison rather than the White House. He [is] being dominated and humiliated by Harris and he’s losing it.” His post after the interview, in which he boasted “[t]he questions were Rude and Nasty, often in the form of a statement, but we CRUSHED IT!” seemed an attempt to reassert his old pattern of simply declaring things to be true that…aren’t.
Indeed, one of Trump’s answers to the journalists in Chicago revealed that he cares only about getting elected, rather than governing. It also suggested that his camp is trying to reassure him that his pick of Ohio senator J.D. Vance to be his running mate will not hurt their chances, even as more and more videos of Vance attacking women become public and as he is historically bad in front of television cameras.
Vance has only 18 months of experience in elected office, making him one of the least qualified candidates for vice president in U.S. history. When asked if Vance would be ready “on day one,” to assume the duties of the presidency if necessary, Trump answered a different question altogether, revealing what is uppermost in his mind. “I’ve always had great respect for him…but…historically, the vice president in terms of the election does not have any impact, I mean, virtually no impact. You have two or three days where there’s a lot of commotion…and then that dies down and it’s all about the presidential thing. Virtually never has it mattered…. Historically, the choice of a vice president makes no difference.”
The Harris campaign responded to Trump’s performance by saying: "The hostility Donald Trump showed on stage today is the same hostility he has shown throughout his life, throughout his term in office, and throughout his campaign for president as he seeks to regain power and inflict his harmful Project 2025 agenda on the American people…. Today's tirade is simply a taste of the chaos and division that has been a hallmark of Trump's MAGA rallies this entire campaign,” while “Vice President Harris offers a vision of opportunity and freedom for all Americans.”
It urged Trump again to “stop playing games and actually show up to the debate on September 10."
Trump’s petulant fury at the Black journalists today suggests just how dangerous it would be to put him in control of the nation’s law enforcement and military capabilities a second time. We were given a glimpse of how eager he was to turn those capabilities against American citizens in his first term when the Department of Justice today released the report of the department’s inspector general concerning the Trump administration’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C., in summer 2020.
The authors of the report emphasized that they were unable to compel the testimony of officials including then–attorney general William Barr, his chief of staff William Levi, FBI deputy director David Bowdich, and FBI Washington Field Office assistant director in charge Timothy Slater.
But what they were able to put together even without their information was that, although the protests were largely peaceful, Trump was desperate to get 2,000 federal officers into the area around the White House on June 1, 2020, to increase federal control of the city. To the frustration of the people in charge of the agencies, he could not articulate a mission, only that he wanted 2,000 people around him. With only about 90 officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Bureau of Prisons, and the U.S. Marshals Service on hand early on the morning of June 1, Barr told a conference call with Justice Department leadership that Trump wanted “max strength” on the streets, and to “dominate the streets.”
Trump then echoed that language in a call with the nation’s governors, saying, “If you don’t dominate your city and your state, they’re [going to] walk away with you. And we’re doing it in Washington, in D.C., we’re going to do something that people haven’t seen before. But you’re going to have total domination.”
Then, the report says, the administration began to prepare to invoke the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that authorizes the president to deploy the U.S. military and federalized National Guard troops within the United States to suppress civil disorder, insurrection, or rebellion. At 4:48 that evening, lawyers from the Office of Legal Counsel, who advise the president, received an email that the president was going to address the nation at 6:00 and that a proclamation invoking the Insurrection Act should be “ready for signing” before then.
Shortly after, additional officers from the Bureau of Prisons—without names on their uniforms because they do not usually wear them, if you remember the concern over those nameless uniforms—arrived at the White House. Barr was in charge of clearing the streets, and ultimately, by about 9:00 he felt things were calm enough that he advised Trump against invoking the Insurrection Act.
But it was evidently a close thing.
today's prisoner exchange is yet another feather in Biden's cap...
Vice President Kamala Harris played a role in negotiations with allies to secure the prisoner-swap deal. Harris met with both German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golob separately in intimate settings during the Munich Security Conference in February to urge both leaders to push the deal through, according to a White House official.
Harris’s meeting with Scholz was particularly critical to securing the exchange because releasing Krasikov was a key Russian demand. The two first had a normal bilateral meeting before Harris asked Scholz to stay back for a “restricted bilateral,” the official said. Harris asked everyone to leave except Scholz and one aide on each side.
“They had a back and forth about how to best move forward about that, but ultimately, she was pressing Scholz to take action on this,” the official said.
Harris has met Scholz previously on several occasions and had a “good working relationship with him,” the official said. That is “part of the reason why she was able to have a really good, frank conversation with him.”
Harris had never met Golob before the conference. Their meeting was the highest-level U.S. engagement at the time with the Slovenian government, which was holding two Russian nationals Moscow wanted released. That meeting was also restricted to just Harris, Golob and two aides.
Separately, Harris spoke to Yulia Navalnaya, widow of Alexey Navalny, on Thursday, according to a White House official. Russian political prisoners who had worked with Navalny were released as part of the swap.
“This is a very good afternoon,” President Joe Biden said today. “[A] very good afternoon.”
“Today, we’re bringing home Paul, Evan, Alsu, and Vladimir—three American citizens and one American green-card holder.
“All four have been imprisoned unjustly in Russia…. Russian authorities arrested them, convicted them in show trials, and sentenced them to long prison terms with absolutely no legitimate reason whatsoever. None.”
In a complicated prisoner swap involving the U.S., Russia, and at least seven other countries, Americans Paul Whelan, Evan Gershkovich, and Alsu Kurmasheva and British-Russian activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who openly opposed the invasion of Ukraine, came home from Russia. Four German citizens who had also been wrongfully detained—meaning they had not broken laws but were being held as political bargaining chips—were also part of the exchange, along with a fifth who was released from Belarus.
Also in the swap were seven Russian citizens who had been detained as political prisoners, four of whom worked with Alexei Navalny, the political opposition leader who died in February in a Russian prison. They have left Russia and will make their way to other countries. It is extraordinary that the U.S. government managed to force Putin to release his own citizens, and Biden called it out. “It says a lot about the United States that we work relentlessly to free Americans who are unjustly held around the world,” he said. “It also says a lot about us that this deal includes the release of Russian political prisoners. They stood up for democracy and human rights. Their own leaders threw them in prison. The United States helped secure their release as well. That’s who we are in the United States.
“We stand for freedom, for liberty, for justice—not only for our own people but for others as well. And that’s why all Americans can take pride in what we’ve achieved today.”
In exchange, Russian president Vladimir Putin got the prisoner he wanted most, hit man Vadim Krasikov, back from Germany. In addition, the U.S. released three Russians, Slovenia released two, and Norway and Poland each released one. All told, eight Russians went home.
Foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum noted that “a group of brave journalists and democracy activists are being exchanged for a group of brutal spies.” The exchange included no money or sanctions relief.
The U.S. had been calling for the freedom of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny as part of the negotiations when he died abruptly in Russian custody in February 2024. His death briefly derailed the negotiations that had been going on since shortly after Biden took office. Even before he took office, he had asked his national security team to dig into all the cases of hostages being wrongfully detained, which they were inheriting from the previous administration. “I wanted to make sure we’d hit the ground running,” Biden said today, “and we did.”
He noted that with today’s releases, his administration “has brought home over 70 Americans who were wrongfully detained and held hostage abroad, many since before I took office.” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan later noted that the administration has reclaimed U.S. citizens from “Afghanistan, Burma, Gaza, Haiti, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Rwanda, and elsewhere.”
Asking Germany to release Krasikov was a big ask, but the government was willing to exchange him for Navalny. After Navalny’s death, it seemed likely the deal could not be revived. But Sullivan believed he saw a way forward, and Biden called German chancellor Olaf Scholz and asked him to continue to move forward. “For you, I will do this,” Scholz said. The president told Sullivan to get it done. In April President Biden sent a formal request to Scholz asking him to make the complicated swap that transpired today. When a reporter today asked Biden what Scholz had demanded in return, Biden answered: “Nothing.”
In his remarks today, Biden emphasized that the deal was “a feat of diplomacy and friendship—friendship. Multiple countries helped get this done. They joined difficult, complex negotiations at my request. And I personally thank them all again. And I’ve thanked them personally, and I’ll thank them again.”
“This deal would not have been made possible without our allies Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway, and Turkey. They all stepped up, and they stood with us. They stood with us, and they made bold and brave decisions, released prisoners being held in their countries who were justifiably being held, and provided logistical support to get the Americans home. So, for anyone who questions whether allies matter, they do. They matter.
“And today is a powerful example of why it’s vital to have friends in this world—friends you can trust, work with, and depend upon, especially on matters of great consequence and sensitivity like this.
“Our alliances make our people safer.”
Sullivan was clear about where specific praise was due. “Today’s exchange is a feat of diplomacy that honestly could only be achieved by a leader like Joe Biden,” he said at a press conference this afternoon.” He directed the team and was personally engaged in the diplomacy necessary. “There is no more singular or concrete demonstration that the alliances that the president has reinvigorated around the world matter to Americans—to the individual safety of Americans and to the collective security of Americans,” Sullivan said. “And honestly, guys, I can just say this was vintage Joe Biden, rallying…American allies to save American citizens and Russian freedom fighters and doing it with intricate statecraft, pulling his whole team together to drive this across the finish line.”
Tearing up, Sullivan added, “Today…was a very good day.”
This deal was in the works during the weeks when the press was hounding the president and suggesting he was not fit to do the work of the office. In fact, a senior administration official briefing reporters this morning pointed out that on July 20, an hour before he announced to the nation that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president, Biden “was on the phone with his Slovenian counterpart, urging them to make the final arrangements and to get this deal over the finish line.”
This is the largest prisoner swap since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The administration warned journalists that no one should think that there has been a breakthrough in the relationship between the U.S. and Russia or that tensions have eased. Putin’s continuing attacks on Ukraine and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and our European partners, as well as his growing defense relationship with China, North Korea, and Iran, all mean that “you will not see a policy change from President Biden or the administration when it comes to standing up to Putin’s aggression as a result of this,” an official said.
But the deal does suggest that Putin might be finding it in his own interest to look like he might be willing to negotiate on different issues going forward, a reflection of the damage the Ukraine war has inflicted on his own society. Russia has recently pulled its ships from the Sea of Azov, Russian mercenaries just suffered big losses in Mali, and today, Russian media reported that the country’s largest oil refinery was on fire. Putin might also be seeing that Trump’s path to the White House has gotten dramatically steeper in the past couple of weeks.
Indeed, Putin’s decision to go ahead with the swap was a blow to Trump. Gershkovich was a Wall Street Journal reporter when he was taken into custody in March 2023, and the Wall Street Journal covered the negotiations in quite some depth today. Reporters Joe Parkinson, Drew Hinshaw, Bojan Pancevski, and Aruna Viswanatha noted that Trump got wind that a deal was coming together and began to insist at his rallies and in interviews that Putin would free Gershkovich only for him.
Putin has proven Trump wrong.
That did not, however, stop Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance from claiming that Trump deserved credit for the swap despite Trump’s insistence that Gershkovich would be released only after Trump was reelected. For his part, Trump didn’t express any joy at all in the deal, simply claiming that Biden got fleeced and saying “[o]ur ‘negotiators’ are always an embarrassment to us!”
And from the Department of Poor Timing, MAGA representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina tweeted this morning: “Biden is MIA. Why is no one talking about it?”
At today’s White House announcement, a reporter noted that former president Trump “has said repeatedly that he could have gotten the hostages out without giving anything in exchange,” and asked President Biden: “What do you say to that?”
“Why didn’t he do it when he was president?” Biden answered.
