Here’s something for your ears today. As the US justice department investigates an alleged ‘bribery for pardon’ scheme at the White House, Jonathan Freedland and our Washington bureau chief David Smith delve into the many possible legal issues Donald Trump could face after 20 January, in this week’s extra episode of our Politics Weekly podcast.
Might Donald Trump, once stripped of the near-total immunity that came with his office, face the full might of the law? Could he be charged with crimes, or even go to jail? Or might he pardon himself in advance? Freedland and Smith discuss the many potential scenarios that could play out once Trump is no longer the commander-in-chief.
Rich McKay and David Morgan at Reuters have this on another aspect of the Georgia Senate runoff – the Republican worry that Trump loyalist Kelly Loeffler’s attacks on her opponent, the pastor Rev. Raphael Warnock risk suburban votes.
Loeffler’s attack ads have sought to portray Warnock as a dangerous anti-American, anti-police, anti-Israel “Marxist” tied to Black Chicago pastor Jeremiah Wright and an infamous 2008 sermon in which he declared: “God damn America!”
A Warnock campaign spokesman described the attacks as an attempt to distract voter attention from Loeffler’s record on healthcare and other issues.
“The imagery used certainly had a racial undertone, and I think that turned off voters in those suburban areas,” said Matt Towery, a former Georgia Republican legislator.
Rev. Raphael Warnock, left, and Jon Ossoff, right, gesture toward a crowd during a campaign rally in Marietta, Georgia. Photograph: Brynn Anderson/AP
A spokesman for the Loeffler campaign said any potential issues with suburban voters are not borne out by polling data, which he said shows that her attacks on Warnock are working.
Republicans face the task of trying to turn out two voting blocs: devoted Trump supporters who respond favorably to harsher rhetoric, and moderate suburbanites who don’t.
“As the Republicans hit the accelerator to turn out the vote in south Georgia, middle Georgia and north Georgia, they also turn off white, higher-income voters in these suburban areas,” Towery said. “They have to have two messages.”
This is difficult in a nationalized, big money campaign, where according to the tracking firm AdImpact, a combined $310 billion of TV air time has already been purchased or reserved.
Warnock and Ossoff are also battling for white suburban votes. Democrats will need about 30% of Georgia’s white voters, in addition to a coalition of Black, Latino and Asian voters to pierce the 50% mark needed for victory, political analysts say.
Sen. Kelly Loeffler at a campaign event in Cumming, Georgia. Photograph: Dustin Chambers/Reuters
Loeffler and fellow incumbent Sen. David Perdue have to run up the margins in rural areas to win, said Republican strategist Chip Lake. Both have treated Georgia voters to dire warnings about the consequences of a Democratic Senate majority. Perdue’s TV ads urge supporters to “save America” from higher taxes, open borders, defunded police departments, socialized medicine, military spending cuts, the Green New Deal and voting rights for illegal immigrants.
Loeffler, a wealthy businesswoman, has had to rely on advertising more heavily than Perdue to assure voters about her conservative credentials. As a result, political analysts say, she has more strongly paralleled Trump’s combative messaging style and agenda priorities, at one point describing herself as more conservative than Attila the Hun.
Trump set to host Saturday rally in Georgia amid concerns he is discouraging Republicans from voting
Sam Levine
Donald Trump is set to host a Saturday rally in Georgia amid concerns he is discouraging Republicans there from turning out to vote in a critical runoff contest by attacking top GOP officials and falsely claiming fraud and voting-machine irregularities cost him the November election.
The event will be Trump’s biggest public appearance since losing Georgia, and the presidential race, last month. He will rally on behalf of Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, two Republican senators in runoff contests. Republicans need to win at least one of the contests in order to retain control of the US Senate and maintain a veto over the next four years of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Trump is urging supporters to vote for Perdue and Loeffler, but some Republicans worry he could be hurting their chances of winning. Even after a hand recount confirmed Trump lost Georgia by about 13,000 votes, the president has continued to falsely claim fraud cost him the election. By undermining confidence in the election, Trump could also be telling his supporters that their votes won’t matter.
L Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, two prominent conservative attorneys who have filed a spate of baseless pro-Trump lawsuits alleging election malfeasance, encouraged supporters in Georgia on Wednesday not to vote in the runoff election.
“We’re not gonna go vote 5 January on another machine made by China. You’re not gonna fool Georgians again,” Wood said on Wednesday. “If Kelly Loeffler wants your vote, if David Perdue wants your vote, they’ve got to earn it. They’ve got to demand publicly, repeatedly, consistently, ‘Brian Kemp: call a special session of the Georgia legislature.’ And if they do not do it, if Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue do not do it, they have not earned your vote.
“Don’t you give it to them. Why would you go back and vote in another rigged election?”
Ronna Romney McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, faced skeptical voters in Georgia last weekend and had to reassure them the Senate election was not yet decided.
Kentucky’s senior senator, Republican majority leader Mitch McConnell, is at the center of congressional negotiations on another relief package. Kentucky voters didn’t punish McConnell for the long-stalemated talks in November, instead awarding him a lopsided victory as he secured a seventh term.
He spent the campaign boasting about the money he delivered for the Bluegrass State in the massive federal relief package passed early in the pandemic.
While reports of hardship are growing in Kentucky, much of the political pressure there is focused not on McConnell but on the state’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear.
Bruce Schreiner and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn report for Associated press that Beshear is under fire from business owners and state GOP leaders who think the virus-related restrictions he’s imposed on daily life in Kentucky have gone too far.
Emboldened by gains they made in the November elections, GOP legislative leaders are expected to push to rein in Beshear’s authority to take emergency measures when the legislature convenes next year.
Beshear says he’s focused on saving lives but Congress must do its part and pass more aid.
“We need people to not be Democrats or Republicans but to be human beings and do the right thing,” the governor said in an interview. “People out there are dying, People out there are hurting. This is the time to invest in our people and in their safety.”
Kentucky has seen 190,601 coronavirus cases, with 3,836 newly recorded yesterday. There have been 2,014 deaths.
“There is no reason why we should not deliver another major pandemic relief package to help the American people through what seems poised to be the last chapters of this battle,” McConnell said in a Senate speech this week. In his home state, anxiety is rising along with deaths, infections and hospitalizations.
In a region already reeling from the decline of coal mining, eastern Kentucky pastor Chris Bartley has heard an unprecedented chorus of pleas for help from people whose lives have been shattered by the economic turmoil caused by Covid-19.
“You hear the desperation in the phone calls: I have to pay my rent today. I’ve done everything I can do. I’ve offered to rake leaves or mow grass or anything I can do.’ They’ve lost their job or the stimulus has run out,” said Bartley, associate pastor at a Methodist church in Pikeville, Kentucky.
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear in September. Photograph: Timothy D Easley/AP
Beshear, meanwhile, delivers daily doses of grim news of the state’s virus cases and deaths and presses for another economic lifeline for struggling businesses, the unemployed, and state and local governments.
“We saw the first round of CARES Act funding really flow through our economy in a positive manner,” he said. “People needed the dollars. They spent the dollars. We saw businesses lifted up by those dollars. We were able to use funds to help people stay in their homes with an eviction-relief fund. Pay their utility bills so they didn’t end up in debt.”
Beshear has carefully avoided calling out McConnell or president Donald Trump as the impasse drags on. Republicans dominated federal and state elections last month in Kentucky. “I’m willing to take whatever blame some people want to heap out there,” he said.
“If it means that their relatives are still around for Christmas this year and Christmas next year, I’ll take it.”
“We heard no fake news. We heard no conspiracy theories. We heard no personal grievances. We heard a President-Elect and a vice president who want to work with the other side.”
That was CNN’s Don Lemon speaking immediately after the network had aired president-elect Joe Biden and vice president-elect Kamala Harris’ first joint interview since winning the election on 3 November. Brian Stelter added this analysis, pulling out his five key quotes:
In light of the multiple crises Biden is inheriting, Tapper asked, “what does it feel like... what’s the emotion that goes through you?” The first words out of Biden’s mouth were “I’m determined.”
Regarding the Covid-19 crisis, Biden said he will ask Americans to wear masks for “one hundred days.”
Harris on her working relationship with Biden: “We are full partners in this process.”
Biden said Americans will not see “policy by tweets” once he takes office.
Biden said he is reaching out, “not just to the communities that supported me, I’m going to reach out to those who didn’t support me. I mean, for real, because I think a lot of people are just scared and think they’ve been left behind and forgotten. We’re not going to forget anybody in this effort.”
China hits back at US spy chief's 'greatest threat to freedom' claim
Helen Davidson
China has rejected as a “concoction of lies” an incendiary article by the US’s most senior intelligence official, who labelled China the biggest threat to democracy and freedom since the second world war.
In a Wall Street Journal column John Ratcliffe, the US director of national intelligence, said China was bent on world domination and the US needed to prepare for an “open-ended period of confrontation”. While intelligence agencies had historically prioritised concerns over Russia and counter-terrorism, China should now be the primary national security focus of the US, he warned, and it posed “the greatest threat to America today, and the greatest threat to democracy and freedom worldwide since world war two”.
Ratcliffe said China was “regularly” directing influence operations on US soil, and had targeted members of Congress at a frequency six times that of Russia, and 12 times that of Iran. He also accused China of stealing US technology to fuel Xi Jinping’s huge modernisation of the People’s Liberation Army.
At a regular press briefing on Friday, China’s foreign affairs spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, said the article was “just a sensational headline” and did not show any real evidence. “He just continued and repeated what is I think another concoction of lies,” she said.
“We hope that American politicians will respect the facts, stop making and selling fake news, stop fabricating and spreading political viruses and lies, and stop damaging Sino-US relations, otherwise it will only further damage the credibility of the United States.”
Earlier a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in the US told Reuters that Ratcliffe’s comments were “fact-distorting” and hypocritical, and showed “the entrenched cold war mindset and ideological prejudices of some people on the US side”.
Americans couldn’t resist the urge to gather for Thanksgiving, driving only slightly less than a year ago and largely ignoring the pleas of public health experts who begged them to forgo holiday travel to help contain the coronavirus pandemic
Vehicle travel in early November was as much as 20% lower than a year earlier, but it surged around the holiday and peaked on Thanksgiving Day at only about 5% less than the pandemic-free period in 2019, according to StreetLight Data, which provided an analysis to the Associated Press.
“People were less willing to change their behavior than on any other day during the pandemic,” said Laura Schewel, founder of StreetLight Data.
Airports also saw some of their busiest days of the pandemic, though air travel was much lower than last year. The Transportation Security Administration screened more than 1 million passengers on four separate days during the Thanksgiving travel period. Since the pandemic gutted travel in March, there has been only one other day when the number of travelers topped 1 million.
“If only a small percentage of those travelers were asymptomatically infected, this can translate into hundreds of thousands of additional infections moving from one community to another,” Dr. Cindy Friedman, a CDC official, said this week during a briefing.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has urged people to stay home for the Christmas holidays, but officials acknowledged that many people would not heed that advice and advised them to get tested before and after trips. Friedman said that this year’s holidays presented “tough choices” for many families.
Trananda Graves, who runs a travel-planning company in Keller, Texas, took a Thanksgiving road trip with her family to Nashville, Tennessee. It was a chance for her daughter to connect with relatives as they shared recipes, and Graves said everyone’s mood was uplifted.
“It was just a break to get away from home,” Graves said. “We work at home, we go to school at home.”
She decided to drive to meet extended family after seeing that flights were crowded and said her family followed guidance to avoid spreading infections. But infections, even from small Thanksgiving gatherings, have begun to stream in around the country, adding another burden to health departments that are already overwhelmed.
“This uptick here is really coming at a time when everyone’s exhausted,” said Don Lehman, a spokesman for the Warren County Public Health Department in upstate New York.
The county concluded that Thanksgiving gatherings or travel likely caused 40% of the 22 cases it reported in the last two days. That means contact tracers have to figure out where people came from or traveled to and contact health officials in those places. Lehman said it adds “a lot of legwork” to the contact-tracing process.
California, the country’s most populous state, has announced sweeping plans for a new, regional stay-at-home order that is likely to affect nearly all of the state within days.
The order is pegged to hospital capacity – regions where where ICU capacity falls below 15% will come under the new restrictions.
The orders are the strictest to be imposed since the statewide stay-at-home order in March. “This is the most challenging moment since the start of the pandemic,” said the governor, Gavin Newsom, announcing the order on Thursday.
The new stay-at-home order will impose new restrictions on business and gathering spaces. Residents have been directed to remain at home and avoid all non-essential travel. Activities such as grocery shopping, medical appointments, dog walks and individual outdoor exercise are permitted.
Restaurants will be limited to takeout and pickup service, while bars, breweries and distilleries will be closed, along with fitness centers, hair salons, barber shops, casinos and nail salons.
Retail establishments may remain in business while limited to 20% of capacity, with hotels permitted to stay open to support “critical infrastructure” only.
Office workplaces will be closed except for essential sectors where remote working is impossible. Public schools with in-classroom instruction already in place may remain open.
Under the plan, indoor religious services will remain prohibited, despite recent US supreme court decisions siding with churches and synagogues that challenged state social distancing rules on worship.
Here’s those clips of last night’s interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper where US president-elect Joe Biden said that he will ask Americans to commit to 100 days of wearing masks as one of his first acts as president. Biden and vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris, also committed to receiving coronavirus vaccinations as soon as possible, when approved by US regulators. Yesterday, former presidents Obama, Bush and Clinton all committed to getting vaccinated on TV if it would help dispel people’s worries over the vaccine.
'100 days, not for ever': Biden to ask Americans to wear masks to fight Covid-19 – video
Welcome to our live coverage of US politics for Friday, after a day on which the US has again set new records for new coronavirus cases and new Covid deaths.
There were 217,664 new coronavirus cases in the US yesterday according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker – a new single day high.
2,879 people died. It’s the second day in a row the US has set a new record number of deaths. (Johns Hopkins has revised down Wednesday’s initial figure from 3,157 deaths to 2,804, reportedly due to an error in one state.)
The total number of deaths since the pandemic began has now reached 276,366.
There hasn’t been a single day since the 3 November election when the US has recorded fewer than 100,000 new cases, and the total caseload has now reached 14,143,801.
Vice president Mike Pence will visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for a coronavirus briefing. This week CDC director Dr Robert Redfield said “The reality is December and January and February are going to be rough times. I actually believe they are going to be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation.”
California has unveiled plans to issue regional stay-at-home orders for areas in the state where intensive care units are expected to fall below a capacity of 15%. The vast majority of the state is expected to meet that criteria within the next few days.
The Trump administration has formally announced the go-ahead for the fiercely opposed sale of controversial gas and oil drilling licences in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The sale of leases is planned for 6 January 2021, a few days before Trump leaves the White House.
There’s new economic figures due out at 8:30ET, and later on Joe Biden is expected to make comments about jobs and the economy from Wilmington, Delaware. He’ll also receive the daily presidential briefing.
The president has no engagements in his diary today.
