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Ron DeSantis has recently gained a reputation as the GOP’s best hope to keep Donald Trump from the top of the ticket in 2024.
The governor reinvigorated the culture wars in Florida, including by taking on Disney World, cracking down on shaky claims of election fraud and going after the state’s higher education institutions for being too “woke”.
But that doesn’t mean Republicans won’t have other candidates to choose from. Trump’s former UN ambassador Nikki Haley formally launched her presidential campaign this week, and his ex-vice-president Mike Pence is waiting in the wings, along with a host of others. That all could be good news for the former president; a recent poll showed it would be DeSantis’s support – not Trump’s – that would suffer in a contested primary.
Sarah Palin, the one-time candidate for vice-president whose hokey, vapid brand of conservatism is seen as a prototype for Trump’s iconic style, thinks DeSantis should hold off. “He should stay governor for a bit longer. He’s young, you know. He has decades ahead of him where he can be our president,” she said this week. That’s the opposite of the advice she gave herself in 2009, when she resigned as Alaska’s governor before completing her term.
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US finishes recovering Chinese balloon
American authorities have retrieved all the wreckage of the Chinese spy balloon a US fighter jet shot down off South Carolina’s coast, the Associated Press reports, which sparked a diplomatic incident with Beijing and kicked off a unusual spate of military action against unidentified objects in North American skies.
According to the AP, “Officials said the US believes that Navy, Coast Guard and FBI personnel collected all of the balloon debris off the ocean floor. US Northern Command said in a statement that the recovery operations ended Thursday and that final pieces are on their way to the FBI lab in Virginia for analysis. It said air and maritime restrictions off South Carolina have been lifted.”
The military shot the Chinese balloon down on 4 February when it was over the Atlantic Ocean, after it had traversed the continental United States. Defense officials argued that if the balloon was downed over land – as Republicans had called for – its wreckage could harm people or property below.
In the days that followed, American jets shot down three more objects flying over the United States and Canada. The objects have yet to be retrieved or identified, but on Thursday, Joe Biden said there’s no evidence yet that they were connected with China, or used for surveillance.
Is the United States really the “home of the free”? As the Guardian’s Patrick Wintour reports, a new ranking tracking abuses of power gives the world’s third most-populous country a surprisingly poor score:
The US scores surprisingly badly in a new ranking system charting abuses of power by nation states, launched by a group co-chaired by former UK foreign secretary David Miliband.
The US comes close to the median of 163 countries ranked in the Index of Impunity, reflecting a poor record on discrimination, inequality and access to democracy. The country’s arms exports and record of violence are an even bigger negative factor.
The US ranks worse on impunity than Hungary and Singapore, one a poster child for democratic backsliding and the other an illiberal democracy.
The UK performs creditably at 147, only 26 rankings away from the most accountable state. Its score is brought down by its protection of offshore tax havens that facilitate tax abuse in other countries.
Former colonies, many affected by the slave trade, fare poorly in the index, suggesting the experience of imperialist subjection has caused a continuing damaging legacy. Nearly all of the top 20 ranked in the index in terms of impunity are former colonies or touched by colonialism.
The findings are likely to stimulate the already fraught questioning of the presumed superiority of the west, an issue that bedevils debate at the UN and has come to dampen some of the expected support for Ukraine since Russia’s invasion.
The five police officers implicated in Tyre Nichols’s death in Memphis pleaded not guilty to murder charges today. As the Guardian’s Sam Levine reports, the fact that their prosecution is happening at all is due to the local district attorney, who broke with prosecutors’ typical practice to swiftly indict the men involved:
Steve Mulroy had been the Shelby county district attorney for just over 100 days when five Memphis police officers beat and killed Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man.
As the case began to get more and more attention, Mulroy, a Democrat, did something surprising. In high-profile police killings, prosecutors and police are slow to release video while they investigate. Criminal charges against the police officers, if they’re filed at all, come much later.
But Mulroy moved quickly to criminally charge the officers, indicting the five involved in Nichols’ death less than three weeks after the murder. He and the city released body-camera and surveillance footage days later. It was a series of decisions, Mulroy believes, that contributed to why protests after the video was released remained peaceful.
Yesterday’s partial release of a special grand jury report into Donald Trump’s election meddling campaign in Georgia answered few of the many questions about one of the biggest legal threats the former president is facing.
But it was enough for Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state who defied Trump’s request to work with him to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory, to claim victory.
“We were vindicated. We’ve been shown that we’ve been factually correct from day one,” Raffensperger said in an interview with Atlanta’s WSB-TV. “We have been saying since day one that Georgia has honest and fair elections.”
The secretary of state, who was last year re-elected despite a challenge from a Trump-backed candidate, pointed to the report’s conclusion that “no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election.”
“We feel that there’s every question that people had that should really put that to rest now,” he said.
Only the report’s introduction, conclusion and a chapter on jurors’ concerns that some witnesses lied were released. The sections in which the panel weighs in on who should face which charges was kept from the public eye. Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis is using the document to determine whether the election meddling effort merits prosecutions – including, potentially, of Trump.
The revelations from the Fox News text messages are generating headlines all over the place … except at the Wall Street Journal, which is also owned by Rupert Murdoch.
CNN was the first to spot it:
Needless to say, Fox News also does not appear to be covering the story.
Fox News hosts are and were some of the biggest proponents of the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. But the Associated Press reports that newly released text messages show top names at the network never believed their own words:
Hosts at Fox News did not believe the allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election that were being aired on their programmes by supporters of former president Donald Trump, according to court filings in a $1.6bn (£1.34bn) defamation lawsuit against the network.
“Sidney Powell is lying” about having evidence for election fraud, Tucker Carlson wrote in a message on 16 November 2020, according to an excerpt from an exhibit that remains under seal.
The internal communication was included in a redacted summary judgment brief filed on Thursday by attorneys for Dominion Voting Systems.
Carlson also referred to Powell in a text as an “unguided missile” and “dangerous as hell”. Fellow host Laura Ingraham told Carlson that Powell was “a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy”, referring to the former New York mayor and Trump supporter Rudy Giuliani.
Sean Hannity, meanwhile, said in a deposition “that whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second”, according to Dominion’s filing.
A small but bipartisan group of House lawmakers is demanding the Biden administration send Ukraine F-16s or another American fighter jet to help defend against Russia’s invasion, Politico reports.
“The provision of such aircraft is necessary to help Ukraine protect its airspace, particularly in light of renewed Russian offensives and considering the expected increase in large-scale combat operations,” according to a letter sent by a group of five House members – three Democrats and two Republicans.
“F-16s or similar fourth generation fighter aircraft would provide Ukraine with a highly mobile platform from which to target Russian air-to-air missiles and drones, to protect Ukrainian ground forces as they engage Russian troops, as well as to engage Russian fighters for contested air superiority.”
Politico reports that Jared Golden organized the letter, which was signed by Jason Crow and Chrissy Houlahan, all Democrats. Republicans Mike Gallagher and Tony Gonzales also signed on.
Ukraine has asked for F-16s since the war started last year, but Washington has yet to agree to the demand.
Meanwhile in Congress, top Democratic and Republican leaders remain supportive of Ukraine, but the Guardian’s Julian Borger reports an ascendant faction of right-wing lawmakers could threaten Washington’s aid flows:
Vladimir Putin has proven adept at exploiting the US political divide, so the solid bipartisan consensus behind arming Ukraine over the past year may well have come as a surprise to him. The question one year into the war is: how long can that consensus last?
Two weeks before the first anniversary of the full-scale invasion on 24 February, a group of Trump-supporting Republicans led by Matt Gaetz introduced a “Ukraine fatigue” resolution that, if passed, would “express through the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States must end its military and financial aid to Ukraine, and urges all combatants to reach a peace agreement”.
The resolution is sponsored by 11 Republican members of Congress on the far right Freedom Caucus faction, and is highly unlikely to pass. But it marks a shot across the bows of the leadership, which has mostly vowed to stay the course in supporting Ukraine.
Justifying the resolution, Gaetz pointed to the risks of escalation of the Ukraine war into a wider global conflict and to the economic cost to the US.
“President Joe Biden must have forgotten his prediction from March 2022, suggesting that arming Ukraine with military equipment will escalate the conflict to ‘World War III’,” the Florida Republican said. “America is in a state of managed decline, and it will exacerbate if we continue to haemorrhage taxpayer dollars toward a foreign war.”
Ron DeSantis has recently gained a reputation as the GOP’s best hope to keep Donald Trump from the top of the ticket in 2024.
The governor reinvigorated the culture wars in Florida, including by taking on Disney World, cracking down on shaky claims of election fraud and going after the state’s higher education institutions for being too “woke”.
But that doesn’t mean Republicans won’t have other candidates to choose from. Trump’s former UN ambassador Nikki Haley formally launched her presidential campaign this week, and his ex-vice-president Mike Pence is waiting in the wings, along with a host of others. That all could be good news for the former president; a recent poll showed it would be DeSantis’s support – not Trump’s – that would suffer in a contested primary.
Sarah Palin, the one-time candidate for vice-president whose hokey, vapid brand of conservatism is seen as a prototype for Trump’s iconic style, thinks DeSantis should hold off. “He should stay governor for a bit longer. He’s young, you know. He has decades ahead of him where he can be our president,” she said this week. That’s the opposite of the advice she gave herself in 2009, when she resigned as Alaska’s governor before completing her term.
DeSantis set to talk to police union as 2024 run speculation mounts
Good morning, US politics blog readers. Donald Trump is running for president, and so is Nikki Haley, but what about Ron DeSantis? The Florida governor has been seen as a potential replacement for Trump at the top of the Republican ticket ever since the former president left the White House. DeSantis is keeping mum about his plans, but Politico reports he’s heading next week to speak to a police union in Chicago. It’s not as big a tell as a visit to Iowa, but the address will nonetheless offer a platform for DeSantis to detail how he’d take his approach to law enforcement – including, perhaps, an armed election fraud taskforce that’s made high-profile arrests at gunpoint but had mixed success in court – national.
Here’s a look at what’s going on today:
Kamala Harris is at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, where she’ll meet with German chancellor Olaf Scholz and British prime minister Rishi Sunak. A big congressional delegation is also in attendance, including the Senate’s Democratic and Republican leaders, Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will answer reporters’ questions at 1:30pm ET.
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