CNN plays tape of Trump appearing to show off classified military documents
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Former Trump administration press secretary Stephanie Grisham has claimed that she saw Donald Trump showing off documents to guests at Mar-a-Lago, as she slammed his lack of respect for the nation’s secrets.
“I watched him show documents to people at Mar-a-Lago on the dining room patio,” Ms Grisham told MSNBC.
“He has no respect for classified information [and] never did.”
Her comments come after the former president was charged with 37 felonies last month over his handling of classified documents after leaving the White House.
While his legal troubles are heating up, a conservative billionaire network is reportedly working to ensure he doesn’t win the 2024 Republican primary, according to a new report.
Americans for Prosperity Action, a network of political organisations created by Charles and David Koch, will spend money for the first time on the Republican presidential primary.
It has already raised more than $70m to fund races that officials hope will help the Republican party move past Mr Trump, according to The New York Times.
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1688413517Trump returns to campaign rallies, draws thousands to small South Carolina city ahead of July 4
Former President Donald Trump on Saturday marked a return to the large-scale rallies of his previous presidential campaigns, speaking to thousands gathered in the streets of a small South Carolina city on a blazing day ahead of the July 4 holiday.
“There’s nowhere else I’d rather be to kick off the Fourth of July weekend than right here on Main St., with thousands of hardworking South Carolina patriots who believe in God, family and country,” Trump said to a roaring crowd standing on asphalt as temperatures climbed into the 90s.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many people had gathered in the streets of downtown Pickens, a small city in South Carolina’s conservative Upstate of around 3,400 residents. Law enforcement officials told some media outlets that around 15,000 people had gathered by 11 a.m., two hours before Trump’s remarks.
The heavily Republican area is a popular one for GOP hopefuls as they aim to attract support for South Carolina’s first-in-the-South presidential primary. In recent months, other candidates including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy have all held events in the Upstate, as well as the two South Carolinians in the race: former Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott.
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Biden traveling to UK next week for meeting with King Charles
Mr Biden will meet King Charles and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the White House said in a brief statement on Sunday. Buckingham Palace confirmed the news.
“President Biden is scheduled to travel to the United Kingdom, Lithuania, and Finland from July 9-13. President Biden will first travel to London, United Kingdom for engagements with King Charles III and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to further strengthen the close relationship between our nations,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
She added: “The President will then travel to Vilnius, Lithuania from July 11-12 to attend the 74th NATO Summit. On July 13, President Biden will visit Helsinki, Finland for a U.S.-Nordic Leaders Summit. More details about the trip will be announced soon.”
Mr Biden’s first meeting with King Charles comes soon after the coronation of the British monarch, which he did not attend. First Lady Jill Biden and granddaughter Finnegan represented the US at the historic event. The US president last was in Europe in mid-April to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, and met with Ireland’s prime minister. He and the first lady travelled to London for the funeral of the late Queen last September.
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John Bowden3 July 2023 20:15
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Democrats’ new primary calendar remains unresolved. The party insists that’s OK
South Carolina and Nevada are on board but face stiff Republican pushback. Michigan’s compliance may mean having to cut the state legislative session short, despite Democrats controlling both chambers and the governor’s mansion.
Then there’s Iowa, which is looking for ways to still go first without violating party rules.
Months after the Democratic Party approved President Joe Biden‘s plan to overhaul its primary order to better reflect a deeply diverse voter base, implementing the revamped order has proven anything but simple. Party officials now expect the process to continue through the end of the year — even as the 2024 presidential race heats up all around it.
“Despite the fact that it looked like relatively smooth sailing for the president when he proposed it … the kind of backlash you’re hearing, the reactions, are exactly what we would have expected,” said David Redlawsk, chair of the political science department at the University of Delaware and co-author of the book “Why Iowa? How Caucuses and Sequential Elections Improve the Presidential Nominating Process.”
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Harvard sued over ‘legacy admissions’ after Supreme Court targets affirmative action
The lawsuit, alleging widespread discrimination at the college in violation of the Civil Rights Act, is the latest challenge to the practice of prioritising university admissions for the children of alumni.
“There’s no birthright to Harvard. As the Supreme Court recently noted, ‘eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.’ There should be no way to identify who your parents are in the college application process,” said Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of Boston-based Lawyers for Civil Rights, which filed the complaint on 3 July.
“Why are we rewarding children for privileges and advantages accrued by prior generations?” he said in a statement. “Your family’s last name and the size of your bank account are not a measure of merit, and should have no bearing on the college admissions process.”
The group filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Chica Project, the African Community Economic Development of New England and the Greater Boston Latino Network.
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Alex Woodward3 July 2023 19:15
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Senator who once worked at a Planned Parenthood warns that Republicans are planning a national abortion ban
When a draft of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v Jackson opinion that would overturn Roe v Wade leaked in May of last year, US Senator Tina Smith had only three words.
“This is bulls***,” the Minnesota Democrat tweeted. She had similar words when Walgreens announced in March of this year it would not dispense abortion pills in states where abortion remained legal.
Ms Smith told The Independent in a phone interview that she knew the consequences of overturning the enshrined constitutional right to seek an abortion from her time working at Planned Parenthood as the Minnesota branch’s executive vice president for external affairs. She said her time working there taught her about the effects restrictions have on women’s lives.
“The first thing I realized is that for women facing a decision about what to do about an unplanned pregnancy, a pregnancy that they don’t want, this is a purely personal decision for them,” she said. “As a policymaker, why do Republicans in the Senate and in state legislators around the country think that they know better than those women whose stories they’ll never know? Why do they think that they should be the ones who decide? It’s those women’s decisions.”
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Eric Garcia3 July 2023 18:45
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Despite promises, attorneys are scarce as the US resumes speedy asylum screenings at border
As the Biden administration prepared to launch speedy asylum screenings at Border Patrol holding facilities this spring , authorities pledged a key difference from a Trump-era version of the policy: Migrants would be guaranteed access to legal counsel.
Nearly three months and thousands of screenings later, the promise of attorney access appears largely unfulfilled, based on advocacy group reports and interviews with people directly involved, some of whom spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the effort publicly.
A coterie of involved attorneys estimate that perhaps 100 migrants have secured formal representation, and only hundreds more have received informal advice through one-time phone calls ahead of the expedited screenings.
Jones Day, one of the world’s largest law firms, has partnered with the administration to provide free legal advice to migrants. Its phone bank handled 460 informal phone consultations, each one typically lasting about two hours, as of June 21, according to one of the people who spoke to AP on condition of anonymity. Jones Day itself had only two formal clients, the person said.
Four other advocacy groups that offer free advice and whose names are posted on the immigration court system’s website have handled far fewer phone consultations, partly because they started much later, the person said.
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Prosecutor in the Hunter Biden case denies retaliating against IRS agent who talked to House GOP
The federal prosecutor leading the investigation of President Joe Biden‘s son Hunter is pushing back against claims that he was blocked from pursuing criminal charges in Los Angeles and Washington and denies retaliating against an IRS official who disclosed details about the case.
In a two-page letter to House Republicans on Friday, U.S. Attorney David Weiss in Delaware defended the lengthy investigation into Hunter Biden‘s financial dealings that ended last month with a plea with the Justice Department that likely spares Biden from time behind bars.
Weiss, who was named to that post by President Donald Trump and was kept on by the Biden administration, said in his letter that the department “did not retaliate” against Gary Shapley, an IRS agent who said the prosecutor helped block Shapley’s job promotion after the tax agency employee had reached out to congressional investigators about the Biden case.
Shapley is one of two IRS employees interviewed by Republicans pursuing investigations into nearly every facet of the younger Biden’s business dealings.
One of the investigating committees, the House Ways and Means Committee, voted to publicly disclose congressional testimony from the IRS employees shortly after the plea deal was announced June 20.
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‘Parental rights’ group Moms for Liberty plans nationwide strategy for school board races in 2024
Moms for Liberty, a “parental rights” group that has sought to take over school boards in multiple states, is looking to expand those efforts across the country and to other education posts in 2024 and beyond. The effort is setting up for a clash with teachers unions and others on the left who view the group as a toxic presence in public schools.
The group’s co-founder, Tiffany Justice, said during its annual summit over the weekend in Philadelphia that Moms for Liberty will use its political action committee next year to engage in school board races nationwide. It also will “start endorsing at the state board level and elected superintendents.”
Her comments confirm that Moms for Liberty, which has spent its first two years inflaming school board meetings with aggressive complaints about instruction on systemic racism and gender identity in the classroom, is developing a larger strategy to overhaul education infrastructure across the country.
As the group has amassed widespread conservative support and donor funding, its focus on education ensures that even as voters turn their attention to the 2024 presidential race, school board elections will remain some of the most contentious political fights next year.
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The 2024 Republican presidential field keeps growing. So why aren’t there more women?
As Republicans keep jumping into the 2024 race for president, one demographic group seems notably lacking: women.
More than a dozen candidates are seeking the nomination, including several long shots who announced their bids in recent weeks, in what is the party’s most diverse presidential field ever. Yet Nikki Haley, a former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina governor, is the only woman among the bunch.
America has never had a female commander in chief and Republicans historically have focused less on electing female candidates in general than the Democratic Party. And while women make up more than 50% of the population, they are underrepresented in public office, whether at city halls, state legislatures or in Washington.
In recent years, multiple organizations have helped women win election in higher numbers and capture races at the same rate as men. But they are still much less likely than men to run for office, even if they are equally qualified, research shows.
Women accounted for roughly 21% of the major party candidates for U.S. Senate last year and about 31% of U.S. House candidates, according to the Center for American Women and Politics. That follows election cycles in which each party had a record number of women elected. Women constitute less than one-third of the U.S. House and Senate and 31% of statewide elected offices, even with a record 12 female governors after last year’s midterms.
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For presidents, July Fourth is a day to chill or strut or get an earful of red, white and boo
Through history, the Fourth of July has been a day for some presidents to declare their independence from the public. They’ve bailed to the beach, the mountains, the golf course, the farm, the ranch. In the middle of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt was sailing to Hawaii on a fishing and working vacation.
It’s also been a day for some presidents to insert themselves front and center in the fabric of it all.
Teddy Roosevelt drew hundreds of thousands for his July Fourth oratory. In 2019, Donald Trump marshaled tanks, bombers and other war machinery for a celebration that typically avoids military muscle.
Richard Nixon enraged the anti-war masses without even showing up. As the anti-Nixon demonstrations of 1970 showed, Independence Day in the capital isn’t always just fun and games. It has a tradition of red, white and boo, too.
In modern times, though, presidents have tended to stand back and let the people party.
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https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-rally-desantis-news-today-latest-b2368296.html
