‘Havana syndrome’ not caused by foreign adversary, US intelligence reportedly finds – live

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Joe Biden is cheering news that drugmaker Eli Lilly will drop the price of insulin:

As is Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee:

Thanks to the leadership of President Joe Biden, Americans across the country will no longer be forced to pay astronomical prices for the life-saving insulin they need. Make no mistake: Eli Lilly’s decision to cap its insulin prices at $35 a month is a direct result of President Biden calling on drug manufacturers to lower insulin prices for everyone else, after Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act to cap insulin costs for seniors on Medicare, which every single Republican in Congress voted against. While Democrats’ fight to bring down costs for American families, MAGA Republicans have threatened to try and repeal the Inflation Reduction Act and raise drug prices for millions of Americans.”

Attorney general Merrick Garland usually presents a placid facade in public, but in today’s Senate judiciary committee oversight hearing, Republican Ted Cruz managed to get the top prosecutor’s back up.

The Texas lawmaker hammered Garland about why US Marshals did not stop protesters outside the homes of supreme court justices who voted last year to overturn Roe v Wade. Republicans have used the arrest of California man who allegedly plotted to murder conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh to argue that the demonstrators presented a threat to justices, and that the Biden administration did little to stop it.

Here’s the exchange:

Intelligence agencies find no foreign adversary behind 'Havana syndrome': report

A review by US intelligence agencies could not conclude that a foreign adversary was behind “Havana syndrome,” a mysterious health ailment that affected US government workers overseas, the Washington Post reports.

The determination in a report authored by seven intelligence agencies clashes with a conclusion reached by a panel of expert scientists last year, which found pulsed electromagnetic energy and ultrasound could be behind the mysterious symptoms that include headaches, nausea and ringing in the ears – which in some cases has grown debilitating for those affected.

Here’s more on the latest report, from the Post:

Seven intelligence agencies participated in the review of approximately 1,000 cases of “anomalous health incidents,” the term the government uses to describe a constellation of physical symptoms including ringing in the ears followed by pressure in the head and nausea, headaches and acute discomfort.

Five of those agencies determined it was “very unlikely” that a foreign adversary was responsible for the symptoms, either as the result of purposeful actions — such as a directed energy weapon — or as the byproduct of some other activity, including electronic surveillance that unintentionally could have made people sick, the officials said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the findings of the assessment, which had not yet been made public.

One agency, which the officials did not name, determined that it was “unlikely” that a foreign actor was at fault, a slightly less emphatic finding that did not appreciably change the consensus. One agency abstained in its conclusion regarding a foreign actor. But when asked, no agency dissented from the conclusion that a foreign actor did not cause the symptoms, one of the intelligence officials said.

The symptoms were first reported at the U.S. Embassy in Havana in 2016.

The officials said that as analysts examined clusters of reported cases, including at U.S. embassies, they found no pattern or common set of conditions that could link individual cases. They also found no evidence, including forensic information or geolocation data, that would suggest an adversary had used a form of directed energy such as radio waves or ultrasonic beams. In some cases, there was no “direct line of sight” to affected personnel working at U.S. facilities, further casting doubt on the possibility that a hypothetical energy weapon could have been the culprit, one of the officials said.

One of the officials said that even in geographic locations where U.S. intelligence effectively had total ability to monitor the environment for signs of malicious interference, analysts found no evidence of an adversary targeting personnel.

“There was nothing,” the official said. This person added that there was no intelligence that foreign leaders, including in Russia, had any knowledge of or had authorized an attack on U.S. personnel that could explain the symptoms.

The second official, who described a frustrating “mystery” as to why longtime colleagues had become ill, said analysts spent months churning data, looking for patterns and inventing new analytic methodologies, only to come up with no plausible explanation.

Democrats are cheering after a major drugmaker announced it would cut prices for insulin today, and calling on other companies to follow suit. Here’s more from Reuters:

Eli Lilly will cut list prices by 70% for its most commonly prescribed forms of insulin, Humalog and Humulin, beginning from the fourth quarter of this year, the drugmaker said on Wednesday.

The move comes amid criticism of healthcare companies by US lawmakers over rising costs of insulin, with Joe Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act including a $35 cap on insulin for those enrolled in Medicare health insurance plans.

“While we could wait for Congress to act or the healthcare system in general to apply that standard, we’re just applying it ourselves,” the company’s chief executive, Dave Ricks, told CNN in an interview.

Here’s more from the House’s top Democrat Hakeem Jeffries on the letter he and Chuck Schumer sent to Fox News’s Rupert Murdoch, demanding an end to its hosts’ spreading of election disinformation:

Top Democrats demand Rupert Murdoch stop Fox News hosts from spreading 2020 election lies

The top Democrats in the House and Senate have written to Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch, demanding he stop the network from perpetuating Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

“As noted in your deposition released yesterday, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and other Fox News personalities knowingly, repeatedly, and dangerously endorsed and promoted the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. Though you have acknowledged your regret in allowing this grave propaganda to take place, your network hosts continue to promote, spew, and perpetuate election conspiracy theories to this day,” reads the letter from Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries.

They’re referring to testimony released earlier this week showing Murdoch knew some Fox News hosts “endorsed” the misinformation about the 2020 vote, in which Joe Biden was elected to the White House.

“We demand that you direct Tucker Carlson and other hosts on your network to stop spreading false election narratives and admit on the air that they were wrong to engage in such negligent behavior,” Jeffries and Schumer write, referring to the conservative network’s most popular commentator who was recently given more than 40,000 hours of surveillance footage of the January 6 attack by Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy.

“As evidenced by the January 6 insurrection, spreading this false propaganda could not only embolden supporters of the Big Lie to engage in further acts of political violence, but also deeply and broadly weakens faith in our democracy and hurts our country in countless other ways.”

You can read the full letter here.

Turning our focus for a moment from the president to people who would like to be president, the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports on the latest crack in the rift between supporters of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis:

Ron DeSantis is a “tyrant”, the far-right activist Laura Loomer said, after she and other Trump supporters were barred from a book signing staged by the Florida governor.

“They told me to say anybody wearing Trump has to go right now,” a uniformed officer said in video posted online by Loomer, a failed congressional candidate, conspiracy theorist, Islamophobe and rightwing political gadfly.

“DeSantis people are in there telling me to come out to tell you guys not to be here while he’s here,” the officer said.

Loomer said: “Governor DeSantis, he always talks about how he’s in favour of free speech. So do we have a first amendment right to be here, to rally in support of President Trump?”

“Right you do,” said the officer. “But not now.”

Loomer asked: “DeSantis’s people told you that we have to leave?”

The officer said: “Yes.”

Later, Loomer told the Daily Beast: “Police showed up and they told us that we were going to be cited and arrested for trespassing if we didn’t leave because DeSantis didn’t want us inside. It shows that he’s a tyrant.”

Biden announces 'American dream' Julie Su as labor nominee

Joe Biden introduced Julie Su as his nominee to take over as labor secretary in a White House ceremony today. Photograph: REX/Shutterstock

Calling her “the American dream,” Joe Biden introduced his nominee to lead the labor department Julie Su, who could become the first Asian American to serve as a cabinet secretary in his administration.

“Julie is the American dream,” the president said in a White House ceremony. He noted how both of her parents immigrated to the United States from China, with her mother holding a union job and her father owning a small business. “I think even more importantly, she’s committed to making sure that dream is within reach of every American.”

In her address to a crowd of lawmakers and officials, Su remarked that, “60 years ago, my mom came to the United States on a cargo ship because she couldn’t afford a passenger ticket. Recently, she got a call from the President of the United States telling her that her daughter was going to be nominated to be US labor secretary.”

“I believe in the transformative power of America, and I know the transformative power of a good job,” Su said.

Lawmakers had pressured Biden for not having any cabinet secretaries of Asian American or Pacific Islander descent, though US Trade Representative Katherine Tai’s parents were immigrants from Taiwan, and vice president Kamala Harris’s mother was Indian. In a nod to that pressure, Biden opened the ceremony by remarking, “If in fact, you were not picked to be the next secretary of labor, I would be run out of town.”

Su, who currently serves as deputy labor secretary, will take over from Marty Walsh, who is departing as the head of the labor department to lead the National Hockey League player’s union. Her nomination will have to be confirmed by the Senate, which is controlled by Biden’s Democratic allies.

Arizona has become a focal point of rightwing efforts to disrupt elections, and the Guardian’s Rachel Leingang spoke with its new attorney general about how she plans to keep poll workers safe:

In less than two months on the job, Arizona’s Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, reassigned a unit tasked with investigating election fraud to instead focus on protecting voting rights. She then publicly took former attorney general Mark Brnovich, a Republican, to task for hiding documents that showed the 2020 election was free from widespread fraud.

“Obviously, there are clear differences between me and my predecessor on these issues,” Mayes said.

In Arizona, where a Democratic governor and Republican-controlled legislature are unlikely to agree on any major alterations to election law, the biggest changes for democracy could instead come from the attorney general’s office. As the state’s top prosecutor, Mayes has the power to investigate voting crimes and bring charges against those who break election laws.

Before winning the attorney general’s office, Mayes was a reporter and an attorney and a member of former Democratic governor Janet Napolitano’s administration. A Republican until 2019, Mayes said she switched parties because the GOP’s embrace of Trumpism left her and other moderate Republicans behind.

Her perspective on elections differs greatly from her predecessor. In his last two years in office, Brnovich tried to play both sides of election issues, seeking to appease the far-right flank of his party in pursuit of a US Senate seat while not filing charges for widespread fraud. At first, he defended Joe Biden’s victory in the state, but over time, cast doubt on Maricopa county’s elections.

Mayes also contrasted strongly with her Republican challenger in the 2022 race, Abe Hamadeh, who she narrowly beat. Hamadeh embraced the falsehood that Trump won the 2020 election and was one of several election deniers who lost their statewide races in the increasingly purple state.

Here’s a subject you can expect to hear about when senators question Merrick Garland this morning. Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray revealed that the bureau believes Covid-19 started in a Chinese lab, the Guardian’s Lois Beckett reports:

Christopher Wray, the FBI director, has weighed in on the debate over the origins of the Covid-19 virus, using an appearance on Fox News to endorse the theory that the virus potentially originated from a leak in a Chinese laboratory.

“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” Wray told Fox News’ Brett Baier, adding that the assessment was based on research the agency’s analysts, including scientists, had conducted and that “our work related to this continues”.

Wray’s high-profile public comment highlights the divide within the US intelligence community about the origins of the pandemic, with some federal agencies, including the FBI and the Department of Energy, concluding that the Covid-19 virus probably originated from a lab leak in China, while others have concluded that it first spread from infected animals to humans.

Washington-based FBI agents tried to slow Mar-a-Lago investigation: report

As justice department lawyers pressed the FBI to search Mar-a-Lago for classified materials they believed Donald Trump was keeping there, they encountered resistance from agents in the Washington field office, the Washington Post reports.

Two top agents in the office that would be in charge of leading the search rejected getting a warrant for the ex-president’s south Florida resort, instead advocating to seek permission from Trump’s lawyer before showing up at the property. The Post reports that agents so trusted statements from Trump’s lawyers that all the classified materials they were looking for had been turned over that in June, they advocated closing the inquiry altogether.

The Post reports that the dispute culminated in a tense meeting in late July, in which the justice department’s lawyers prevailed: FBI agents obtained a search warrant and showed up unannounced at Mar-a-Lago days later, finding more secret documents that the former president had been keeping from the government.

The story paints a picture of FBI agents that seemed credulous of the former president’s, up to the point of trying to stall the investigation, which has since the August search emerged as one of the biggest legal threats facing Trump.

Here’s more from the Post’s report:

Some FBI field agents then argued to prosecutors that they were inclined to believe Trump and his team had delivered everything the government sought to protect and said the bureau should close down its criminal investigation, according to some people familiar with the discussions.

But they said national security prosecutors pushed back and instead urged FBI agents to gather more evidence by conducting follow-up interviews with witnesses and obtaining Mar-a-Lago surveillance video from the Trump Organization.

The government sought surveillance video footage by subpoena in late June. It showed someone moving boxes from the area where records had been stored, not long after Trump was put on notice to return all such records, according to people familiar with the probe. That evidence suggested it was likely more classified records remained at Mar-a-Lago, the people said, despite the claim of Trump’s lawyers. It also painted for both sides a far more worrisome picture — one that would soon build the legal justification for the August raid.

By mid-July, the prosecutors were eager for the FBI to scour the premises of Mar-a-Lago. They argued that the probable cause for a search warrant was more than solid, and the likelihood of finding classified records and evidence of obstruction was high, according to the four people.

But the prosecutors learned FBI agents were still loath to conduct a surprise search. They also heard from top FBI officials that some agents were simply afraid: They worried taking aggressive steps investigating Trump could blemish or even end their careers, according to some people with knowledge of the discussions. One official dubbed it “the hangover of Crossfire Hurricane,” a reference to the FBI investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible connections to the Trump campaign, the people said. As president, Trump repeatedly targeted some FBI officials involved in the Russia case.

Merrick Garland to face senators after report of tensions with FBI over Mar-a-Lago search

Good morning, US politics blog readers. The attorney general, Merrick Garland, has been at the center of some of the biggest stories in American politics over the past year, including the appointment of special counsels to investigate Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s possession of classified documents (not to mention the former president’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election), the intelligence community’s inquiry into the origins of Covid-19 and the GOP’s efforts to investigate the Biden administration. This morning at 10am eastern time, he’ll be before the Senate judiciary committee for a regular oversight hearing, where lawmakers from both parties will no doubt press him for answers on all those topics and more. Garland is tight-lipped and unlikely to say anything unguarded, but don’t be surprised if he’s also asked about a Washington Post report from this morning that revealed top FBI officials were hesitant to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort last August, despite pressure from justice department lawyers.

Here’s what else we can expect today:

• Biden will at 93.0am introduce Julie Su during a White House event. She is his nominee to head the labor department, and would also be his first Asian American cabinet secretary.

• House Democrats are holding a behind-closed-doors retreat in Baltimore, which Biden will address later today.

• The House will consider a Republican bill to make the White House report on the inflationary impacts of every executive order. Democrats do not appear to be whipping against this, at least not yet.