On our radar: Biden heads to Pennsylvania
Noted: Biden administration asks Supreme Court not to take citizenship case
This just in: Biden to deliver prime-time address on protecting democracy on Thursday in Philadelphia
Jones won’t run as Working Families Party candidate in N.Y. district, but party hasn’t confirmed who will
Your questions answered: What is a special master?
Noted: White House links Sen. Graham to Biden’s ‘semi-fascism’ comment
Noted: Pelosi complaint gets action from White House
The latest: Biden hasn’t been briefed on documents involved in Mar-a-Lago search
Noted: McConnell, who questioned quality of some candidates, held fundraiser for Oz, Walker and Budd
Fetterman wants Biden to act on marijuana before next week’s visit to Pennsylvania
The latest: Proud Boy who led Jan. 6 mob and menaced Schumer sentenced to 55 months
Analysis: Most Trump voters see civil war as likely within a decade
Noted: Pa. GOP gubernatorial candidate thanked alleged Confederate statue defenders in 2020
Noted: Harriet Hageman, GOP candidate for Wyo.’s House seat, is campaigning… in Iowa
This just in: Biden to travel to two battleground states on Labor Day
On our radar: Biden heads to Pennsylvania
Noted: Biden administration asks Supreme Court not to take citizenship case
This just in: Biden to deliver prime-time address on protecting democracy on Thursday in Philadelphia
Jones won’t run as Working Families Party candidate in N.Y. district, but party hasn’t confirmed who will
Your questions answered: What is a special master?
Noted: White House links Sen. Graham to Biden’s ‘semi-fascism’ comment
Noted: Pelosi complaint gets action from White House
The latest: Biden hasn’t been briefed on documents involved in Mar-a-Lago search
Noted: McConnell, who questioned quality of some candidates, held fundraiser for Oz, Walker and Budd
Fetterman wants Biden to act on marijuana before next week’s visit to Pennsylvania
The latest: Proud Boy who led Jan. 6 mob and menaced Schumer sentenced to 55 months
Analysis: Most Trump voters see civil war as likely within a decade
Noted: Pa. GOP gubernatorial candidate thanked alleged Confederate statue defenders in 2020
Noted: Harriet Hageman, GOP candidate for Wyo.’s House seat, is campaigning… in Iowa
This just in: Biden to travel to two battleground states on Labor Day
Today, a federal judge appointed by Donald Trump is signaling that she is prepared to appoint a special master to review materials seized from Mar-a-Lago by federal agents, injecting new uncertainties in the criminal investigation of the former president. The Justice Department said Monday that FBI agents have already finished their review of possibly privileged documents seized in the Aug. 8 search. U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon plans to hold a hearing this week on Trump’s motion for a special master.
President Biden returned to the White House on Monday ahead of a trip Tuesday to Wilkes-Barre, Pa., where he will discuss his efforts to reduce gun violence. Biden’s native state looms large in the November midterms with competitive House races, a gubernatorial contest and a Senate race in which recent polling gives Democrats hope of winning a GOP Senate seat, with Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D) leading celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz (R).
Got a question about politics? Submit it here. After 3 p.m. weekdays, return to this space, and we’ll address what’s on the mind of readers.
While Monday was supposed to kick off the week with a highly anticipated rocket launch, NASA was unable to send its Artemis mission up to space this morning. The agency said it hopes to try again later this week. Here’s what we’ll be keeping an eye on Tuesday:
The Biden administration on Monday urged the Supreme Court to not take up a case about citizenship rights for American Samoa even though advocates say it would give justices a chance to upend century-old precedents that have been roundly denounced as racist.
Read more on this request here.
President Biden will deliver a prime-time address Thursday at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park, a White House official said Monday.
The speech will be on “the continued battle for the soul of the nation,” the official said. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not have permission to preview the speech.
The president is expected to highlight his administration’s latest achievements and talk about how the country’s democracy is at stake during the midterm elections.
The liberal Working Families Party took a step toward embracing a challenger to Daniel Goldman, the wealthy lawyer who narrowly won a crowded Democratic primary for an open House seat in New York’s 10th Congressional District.
The party said Monday that it removed the losing candidate it backed in the Democratic primary, third-place finisher Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), but it did not say who would replace him in November.
The second-place finisher, Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, has already said she is in talks with the party about possibly running as its candidate in November.
I don’t understand how the Special Master thing works. Does it change anything? Serve a useful legal purpose or cloud the politics? — asks our reader Bruce from Maryland.
Former president Donald Trump requested a special master be appointed to review materials seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate by the FBI. While U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon indicated this weekend that she was prepared to appoint one, the Justice Department said on Monday that it has already wrapped up the review.
It took two weeks for Trump’s team to file a motion asking for a special master. The judge may decide one is no longer needed.
One day after Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) warned that there would be “riots in the street” if former president Donald Trump is prosecuted for taking classified government documents to his Mar-a-Lago home after leaving the White House, the White House press secretary said that was the kind of remark that led President Biden to warn the public about “semi-fascism” in the Republican Party.
Graham made the comment on Fox News’s “Sunday Night in America.” When press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked about it during a White House news briefing Monday, she said: “We have seen Republicans take away our rights, make threats of violence, including this weekend. And that,” she added, “is what the president was referring to when you all asked me last week about the ‘semi-fascism’ comment.”
The White House made it official Monday, saying that a scheduled event to celebrate one of the president’s major legislative accomplishments, passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, would occur Sept. 13.
The change came after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) complained that the event, originally scheduled for Sept. 6, would occur when the House was not in session.
Biden will host the “celebration event” at the White House “on Sept. 13, as you all know,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters at a daily briefing today. On that day the House will be in session.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden has not been briefed on the classified documents found at former president Donald Trump’s home in Florida.
“We have seen the letter from [the Office of National Intelligence] to Congress on this but I would refer you to either [the Office of the Director of National Intelligence] or the Justice Department by any specific questions on this,” Jean-Pierre said. “This involves material that is part of an ongoing criminal investigation and we just aren’t going to comment on that at this time.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) held a fundraiser Friday in Kentucky with three GOP Senate candidates: Georgia’s Herschel Walker, Pennsylvania’s Mehmet Oz, and North Carolina’s Ted Budd.
News of the Louisville fundraiser come days after McConnell warned that the GOP may not win back control of the Senate in November’s midterm elections — a cycle that typically would be favorable to the party not in power — because “candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.”
News of the event also comes after some changes were made to the GOP’s campaign ad strategy. While the National Republican Senatorial Committee last week canceled ad bookings worth about $10 million in critical states including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona, a political action committee linked to McConnell, the Senate Leadership Fund, has reserved $34.1 million in Pennsylvania, $37 million in Georgia, and $27.6 million in North Carolina to support the Republican nominees. Most notable, however, is the $28 million investment in Ohio in support of Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance, who was not listed as a guest at the Louisville event.
When President Biden visits Wisconsin and Pennsylvania next week, he is going, his office said, to “celebrate Labor Day and the dignity of American workers.” Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D), who is running for U.S. Senate, has an additional topic he wants Biden to focus on.
Fetterman said in a statement Monday that Biden “needs to use his executive authority to begin descheduling marijuana” preferably “before his visit to Pittsburgh.”
Descheduling would move marijuana out of its current, highly restrictive category of controlled substances on the federal level, to a lower, less restrictive category where it would still be subject to regulation.
In an encrypted chat during the weeks before the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, D.C. bartender Joshua Pruitt discussed how he wanted to become a full-fledged member of the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violence that his text messages show was planning for full battle at the Capitol.
As Tom Jackman and Rachel Weiner report, he discussed protective gear and lodging with other members. Shortly before the riot, the texts show, he became a member of the group.
Though Pruitt never assaulted any officers or made physical contact with Congress members or staff, on Monday a federal judge sentenced him to 55 months in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release. Pruitt pleaded guilty in June to obstructing an official proceeding, and federal sentencing guidelines suggested a range of 51 to 63 months in prison, in part because he has a lengthy criminal history, including assaulting police, cocaine possession and multiple drunken driving convictions.
A poll released by YouGov found that four in 10 Americans think that a civil war is likely within the next decade. Among those who say they voted for former president Donald Trump in 2020, the number is more than 50 percent — a group that also expects political violence to increase “a lot” over the coming years.
As Philip Bump breaks these figures down, we should stipulate that discussion of civil war is very different from any actual conflict. In fact, experts on civil conflict believe that a full-on armed conflict between political groups is unlikely for a variety of reasons and that political violence might instead manifest as sporadic flare-ups. Not much consolation, certainly, but some. Of course, that’s assuming that tensions flare up at all. Relying on public opinion as an indicator of what’s likely to happen is understandably fraught.
In 2020, Pennsylvania state senator Sen. Doug Mastriano — the current GOP nominee for governor — thanked a group of armed men for allegedly defending a Confederate statue in Gettysburg, Pa.
“Thanks for being here,” Mastriano told the men. “Thanks for being vigilant.”
The statue was of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
The Republican made the comments as the men stood next to a Confederate flag in a Facebook Live video resurfaced by liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America. In the video, Mastriano approaches the men and compliments them on their flags and outfits — a man was wearing a half-American, half-Confederate flag. One of the men in the video is seen in a shirt reading: “Free people have guns slaves don’t.”
Harriet Hageman, the Republican candidate who defeated Rep. Liz Cheney (R) in the race for Wyoming’s sole congressional district, will campaign in Iowa with that state’s Republican Party.
Hageman, who doesn’t hold any political office, will visit Iowa on Oct. 10-11 as part of her House campaign.
“Harriet Hageman fought back against the D.C. swamp and WON. That is exactly our goal here in Iowa: send a clear message to the Democrat elite that we are fed up with them trying to control our lives,” said Jeff Kaufmann, chairman of the Republican Party of Iowa.