House Republicans rally to Trump’s defense with call for DA Alvin Bragg to testify – live

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Idaho wants to bring back execution by firing squad, the Associated Press reports, with the Republican-dominated legislature passing a bill to employ the method in instances where they can’t get the drugs for lethal injection.

If signed into law by GOP governor Brad Little, the northwestern state would join South Carolina, Mississippi, Utah and Oklahoma in allowing the method to be used. However, there is a divide within the Idaho GOP over whether shooting prisoners to death is a good idea, the AP reports:

Sen. Doug Ricks, a Republican who co-sponsored the bill, told his fellow senators on Monday that the state’s difficulty in finding lethal injection drugs could continue “indefinitely” and that he believes death by firing squad is “humane.”

“This is a rule of law issue — our criminal system should work and penalties should be exacted,” Ricks said.

But Sen. Dan Foreman, also a Republican, said firing-squad executions would traumatize the people who who carry them out, the people who witness them and the people who clean up afterward.

“I’ve seen the aftermath of shootings, and it’s psychologically damaging to anybody who witnesses it,” Foreman said. “The use of the firing squad is, in my opinion, beneath the dignity of the state of Idaho.”

The bill originated with Republican Rep. Bruce Skaug, prompted in part by the state’s inability to execute Gerald Pizzuto Jr. late last year. Pizzuto, who now has terminal cancer and other debilitating illnesses, has spent more than three decades on death row for his role in the 1985 slayings of two gold prospectors.

The Idaho Department of Correction estimates that it will cost around $750,000 to build or retrofit a death chamber for firing squad executions.

If Donald Trump is indicted, it will be a first for the United States, but not unheard of for countries worldwide.

Axios has a rundown of all the countries where heads of state have faced criminal charges after their terms in office, totaling at least 76 nations. They include a number of gray-area cases, as well as those that occurred in democracies younger than America’s, or in states with other systems of government.

But a number happened in wealthy democratic nations similar to the United States – such as France, where former president Nicolas Sarkozy has been given jail terms for campaign finance violations, as well as corruption and influence peddling charges. He’s appealing the verdicts.

Or consider the case of South Korea’s former president Park Geun-hye. She was sentenced to 22 years in prison in 2018 for corruption, but pardoned by her successor two years ago.

Asked in the daily briefing about Donald Trump’s calls to protest against his impending indictment, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre essentially dodges.

That’s per the Guardian’s David Smith, who is at the White House:

National security council spokesman John Kirby appeared at the White House press conference and shared the Biden administration’s view of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s visit to the occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol yesterday:

Today, Putin is hosting Chinese president Xi Jinping amid fears Beijing could begin supplying Russia with weapons to help its flagging invasion. For the latest on their high-stakes talks, follow the Guardian’s live blog:

While an indictment of Donald Trump for allegedly paying hush money ahead of the 2016 presidential election would make history, it’s far from the only time dirty tricks have been used in a White House campaign, the Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt reports:

A former Texas governor met Middle Eastern leaders in 1980 to convince Iran to delay releasing American hostages as part of a Republican effort to sabotage Jimmy Carter’s re-election campaign, according to a news report.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that John Connally, who served as Texas’s Democratic governor from 1963 to 1969 and ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, traveled to a number of countries in the summer leading up to the 1980 election.

By that time Ronald Reagan had secured the Republican nomination, and the re-election campaign from his Democratic rival Carter was struggling in the midst of the crisis that resulted from more than 50 Americans being taken hostage from the US embassy in Tehran.

Freshman House Republican Anna Paulina Luna has made her choice: Donald Trump Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s looming indictment has already had one concrete political effect: convincing a rising Republican lawmaker to back the former president, rather than his most prominent challenger Ron DeSantis.

The endorsement came from Anna Paulina Luna, a newly arrived House Republican from Florida who previously said she was partial to Trump in the presidential race, but has now cited Alvin Bragg’s pending charges in giving the former president her full backing.

In a statement to the New York Times, Luna said, “I support President Trump,” and calls Bragg’s prosecution “unheard-of, and Americans should see it for what it is: an abuse of power and fascist overreach of the justice system.”

Joe Biden’s veto of a Republican bill banning the consideration of corporate governance and climate change risks by retirement funds is not sitting well with Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator who’s been a thorn in the side of his administration’s fight against climate change.

While Manchin played a pivotal role in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, Washington’s biggest legislative measure against climate change, that only happened after he swatted down proposals that would have been more effective in curbing America’s emissions.

In a statement released following Biden’s veto, the West Virginia lawmaker lambasted Biden for vetoing legislation he supported:

This Administration continues to prioritize their radical policy agenda over the economic, energy and national security needs of our country, and it is absolutely infuriating. West Virginians are under increasing stress as we continue to recover from a once in a generation pandemic, pay the bills amid record inflation, and face the largest land war in Europe since World War II. The Administration’s unrelenting campaign to advance a radical social and environmental agenda is only exacerbating these challenges. This ESG rule will weaken our energy, national and economic security while jeopardizing the hard-earned retirement savings of 150 million West Virginians and Americans. Despite a clear and bipartisan rejection of the rule from Congress, President Biden is choosing to put his Administration’s progressive agenda above the well-being of the American people.”

Meanwhile, at the White House, Joe Biden just vetoed the first bill of his administration: Republican-backed legislation that overturns a labor department rule allowing retirement fund managers to consider aspects like good corporate governance and climate change risks in their investment strategies.

In a brief video released by the White House, Biden said the legislation was the work of the Republican party’s extreme right flank:

It passed the Republican-controlled House of Representatives with only one Democratic vote, while in the Senate, it was able to pass only after centrist senators Joe Manchin and Jon Tester, who represent red states and are up for re-election next year, voted for it.

The day so far

Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg appears set to indict Donald Trump for the hush money payment he allegedly facilitated to adult film actor Stormy Daniels. The history-making charges could come as soon as today, reports indicate, and been met with a furious reaction from Trump and his allies in the House GOP, who are demanding Bragg sit for an interview and hand over documents. Meanwhile, police in New York are preparing to arrest the former president, and for the possibility that Trump’s supporters heed his call made over the weekend for protests.

Here’s what else has happened today so far:

• Trump won’t fight extradition to New York from his residence in Florida, should he be charged, a campaign insider told the Guardian.

• Fani Willis, the Georgia district attorney investigating the Trump campaign’s attempts to overturn the state’s 2020 election result, is said to be considering racketeering and conspiracy charges.

• Some Republicans think an indictment would be a good thing for Trump.

Now, some news from yet another one of the investigations into Donald Trump, this one involving his possession of classified documents.

On Friday, the special federal prosecutor handling that inquiry, Jack Smith, won a court ruling compelling more testimony from Trump’s attorney Evan Corcoran. Corcoran had already appeared before a grand jury convened by Smith to investigate the government secrets found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, but cited attorney-client privilege to avoid answering some questions.

In response to a petition from Smith, a federal judge overruled Corcoran’s privilege claims, finding that some of the advice he gave Trump could have been used to commit a crime.

Today, CNN said they’d spotted Corcoran going into the Washington DC federal courthouse where the grand jury is hearing testimony – indicating that he may be about to tell Smith whatever he tried to avoid saying:

Donald Trump could be indicted as soon as today or Wednesday, Politico reports.

New York law enforcement officials are meeting today at police department headquarters to plan for the possibility that he will be arrested, the report said. “We’ll be discussing how we bring Trump in,” a person involved in planning for his arrest said. “No decisions have been made yet.”

Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida who is Donald Trump’s closest rival for the Republican presidential nomination, has broken his silence over Trump’s looming indictment in New York.

Ron DeSantis. Photograph: Phil Sears/AP

He did so by mocking the notion that hush money payments to a porn star might be seen as indictable conduct, and repeating an antisemitic dogwhistle.

An indictment is expected this week. On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Trump allies were pressing DeSantis to join Trump allies in Congress in condemning Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney. On Monday morning, speaking to reporters at a college in Panama City, the governor did.

Asked about the prospect of Trump being extradited to New York (the former president having been a Florida resident since leaving power), DeSantis said: “So I’ve seen rumors swirl. I’ve not seen any facts yet. And so I don’t know what’s going to happen.

“But I do know this, that the Manhattan district attorney is a Soros-funded prosecutor. And so he like other Soros-funded prosecutors, they weaponise their office to impose a political agenda on society at the expense of the rule of law and public safety”.

George Soros, a Hungarian-American progressive financier and philanthropist, is a boogeyman for Republicans and a regular target for antisemitic invective.

DeSantis mentioned “Soros funded prosecutors” five times in a two-minute answer about Trump’s hush money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels.

That included a boast about “remov[ing] one from office”, presumably a reference to the case of Andrew Warren, a Democrat twice elected in Hillsborough county but suspended for saying he would not pursue charges against anyone seeking an abortion or gender transition treatment.

DeSantis also tried to hit Bragg over his record on crime, a common Republican tactic.

To laughter, DeSantis said: “I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair. I can’t speak to that.

“But what I can speak to is that if you have a prosecutor who is ignoring crimes happening every single day in his jurisdiction and he chooses to go back many, many years ago, to try to use something about porn star hush money payments, you know, that’s an example of pursuing a political agenda and weaponising the office and I think that’s fundamentally wrong.”