Trump ‘shakes up legal team’ ahead of surrender at Fulton county jail – live | US politics

The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, delivered a sweeping indictment earlier this month that charges Donald Trump, along with more than a dozen co-defendants, with 41 counts including racketeering, conspiracy, solicitation and filing false statements.

These are the other defendants charged in the indictment, which alleges a coordinated group effort to pressure Georgia officials into changing the outcome of the 2020 election.

Nearly an hour into the first Republican debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Fox News hosts Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier asked the eight candidates on the stage whether they would still support Donald Trump as the Republican presidential nominee if he were convicted of the charges he faces.

Six candidates – North Carolina’s Governor Doug Burgum, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, the former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, the former vice-president Mike Pence, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and South Carolina’s Senator Tim Scott – indicated they would still support Trump. Only two candidates – the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson – said they would not.

The debate came one day before Trump was expected to surrender to authorities in Fulton county, Georgia, where he has been charged on 13 felony counts related to his efforts to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory in the state. The former president faces 91 total felony counts across four criminal cases.

But a CBS News/YouGov survey compiled last week found that Trump now holds his largest polling lead to date, as he won the support of 62% of likely Republican primary voters. The survey showed Trump beating his next closest competitor, DeSantis, by 46 points, with every other candidate mired in the single digits.

With such stalwart support for Trump among the Republican base, it remains unclear how any of the participants in the Monday debate could capture the nomination. The electoral threat of nominating a twice-impeached former president, who now faces nearly 100 criminal charges, did not escape the attention of at least one debate participant.

“We have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America,” Haley said. “We can’t win a general election that way.”

Supporters of Donald Trump are beginning to gather near the Fulton county jail in Atlanta, where the former president is expected to appear later today to surrender to authorities in connection with his attempts to reverse his 2020 election loss in Georgia.

Martin Pengelly

Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old biotech entrepreneur running third in Republican polling, emerged in the absence of Donald Trump as a surprise focus of the first debate of the Republican primary, showing scant respect for other candidates and drawing heavy fire in return.

“We live in a dark moment,” Ramaswamy declaimed, in the distinctly Trumpian and conspiratorial fashion that has become a hallmark of his campaign.

Ramaswamy’s bid for the Republican nomination has been hit by recent scandals over remarks that suggested sympathy for conspiracy theories around the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the January 6 assault on the Capitol. But he has sought to portray himself as a Trump-like outsider taking on the establishment with his extreme views.

All the other presidential candidates onstage in Milwaukee, Ramaswamy repeatedly said, were “bought and paid for” by donors.

After all eight candidates declined to raise their hands when asked if they believed human behavior was causing the climate crisis, Ramaswamy jumped in, stridently rapping out:

Unlock American energy, drill, frack, burn coal, embrace nuclear.

Amid exchanges on crime, Ramaswamy attacked the former vice-president Mike Pence, seeming even to doubt a Republican saint, Ronald Reagan, when he said: “Some others like you on this stage may have an, ‘It’s morning in America speech.’ It is not morning in America.

We live in a dark moment and we have to confront the fact that we’re in an internal sort of cold cultural civil war and we have to recognise that.

Ron DeSantis, second to Trump for months but widely seen to be struggling, stood centre stage. But the rightwing Florida governor was often reduced to an onlooker as Ramaswamy threw rhetorical punches and others hit him back, making him a frequent center of the debate.

Read the full report by Martin Pengelly here.

In a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll, 35% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they think the climate change is a major factor in the extreme heat that the US has experienced recently, compared with 85% of those who lean Democratic. Overall, nearly two-thirds of Americans who experienced extremely hot days said climate change was a major factor.

Young Republican voters, however, seem increasingly concerned about the climate crisis. A 2022 Pew poll found that 73% of Republicans aged 18-39 thought climate change was an extremely/very or somewhat serious issue.

Meanwhile, the rightwing groups have been working to boost the fossil fuel industry while undermining the energy transition. Project 2025, a $22m endeavor by the climate-denying thinktank the Heritage Foundation, has developed a presidential proposal that lays out how a Republican president could dismantle US climate policy within their first 180 days in office.

The GOP candidates who’ve held public office have already given voters a glimpse of how they might approach the climate crisis. The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, has supported projects to build sea walls and improve drainage systems as Florida faces increasingly powerful hurricanes and storm surges, as well as threats from sea level rise. But he has refused to acknowledge the role of global heating on these disasters, scoffing at the “politicization of the weather” and pushing bills banning Florida cities from adopting 100% clean energy goals. He also barred the state’s pension fund from considering the climate crisis when making investment decisions.

Donald Trump, who did not attend the debate, has done even more to impede climate action. As president, he rolled back nearly 100 climate regulations, according a New York Times tally.

Among the candidates who do support doing anything about the climate crisis, most think that thing should be carbon capture. Nikki Haley, who as US ambassador to the United Nations helped orchestrated the US withdrawal from the Paris agreement, has presented carbon capture technologies and tree planting as a way to keep burning fossil fuels while slowing the climate crisis.

The consensus among climate scientists is that while such technologies could be a tool in fighting global heating, an overreliance on them could cause the world to surpass climate tipping points.

Unlike in recent election cycles, most Republican presidential hopefuls this time around didn’t flat out deny that the climate crisis is real. But on the Fox News debate stage, they made clear that they’re not interested in dwelling on the issues – or doing much about it.

On Tuesday night, the eight candidates were asked to raise their hands if they believed in the reality of human-caused global heating. They all punted.

The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, immediately derailed efforts to elicit a clear yes or no response. “Let’s have this debate,” he said, before proceeding not to have it at all, instead criticising Joe Biden’s response to the fires in Maui.

Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, was notably the only candidate to full-throatedly deny climate science, making the unsubstantiated claim that “more people are dying due to bad climate change policies than they are due to actual climate change”.

There’s no discernible trend of deaths linked to policies encouraging renewable energy. However, extreme heat – fueled by the climate crisis – killed about 1,500 people last year, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention records. Researchers estimate that the true figure is closer to 10,000 people every year.

Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, on the other hand, said “climate change is real” but then pushed off all responsibility to take care of it on India and China. Both those countries have lower per capita carbon emissions than the US. And as of the latest figures, from 2021, no country had emitted more carbon dioxide since 1850 than the US.

The South Carolina senator Tim Scott didn’t offer much in terms of solutions earlier, pointing a finger at the continent of Africa, as well as India and China. Africa accounts for one-fifth of the world’s population and produces about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the International Energy Association, while disproportionately experiencing the consequences of climate chaos. The US is responsible for about 14% of global emissions.

Eight Republicans vying for the party nomination took the debate stage on Wednesday night in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, throwing punches over Ukraine, a federal abortion ban and more, hoping to increase their chances at defeating the no-show frontrunner.

Absent was Donald Trump, whose pre-taped interview with the rightwing media personality Tucker Carlson simultaneously published on Twitter, now known as X, and sought to siphon away screen time from the debate housed on Fox News, which famously ousted Carlson earlier this year.

But Trump’s presence loomed over the debate, even as candidates seemed to somewhat hold back from criticizing the ex-president, as Fox debate moderator Bret Baier put it, “the elephant not in the room”.

Here are eight key takeaways from the night:

During the first Republican debate on Wednesday, eight candidates attempted to cast themselves as viable alternatives to Donald Trump while, for the most part, studiously ignoring the shadow of the doggedly popular former president who declined to appear on stage.

The Republicans alternatively railed on government excesses – promising, for example, to slash funding for federal programs – while debating the merits of a federal abortion ban and calling for an increasingly militarized southern border.

The debate was somewhat calmer without belligerent Trump, with the exception of outsider tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who clashed repeatedly with former vice-president Mike Pence, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina. Other than his increasingly aggressive approach to immigration, Ron DeSantis – meant to be Trump’s most likely challenger – remained relatively passive.

The debate opened with a focus on the economy, as Fox News moderators Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum played a clip of the viral conservative folk hit Rich Men North of Richmond, in which country artist Oliver Anthony describes his economic struggles while lamenting poor people “milkin’ welfare”. The candidates launched into a brief discussion of the economy – the first and last point on which they appeared to entirely agree.

On the war in Ukraine, the Republicans diverged sharply in their view of the ideal role of US funding for the Ukrainian military. Ramaswamy, who accused supporters of Ukraine of neglecting “people in Maui or the south side of Chicago”, drew sharp rebuke from Christie, who said that “if we don’t stand up to this kind of autocratic killing, we will be next”, describing in vivid detail Russia’s bloody occupation of Ukraine. Pence echoed Christie’s position, calling Vladimir Putin a “dictator”.

The Republicans also used the discussion of the war in Ukraine to pivot to the topic of immigration, articulating a vision of a militarized southern US border. DeSantis, whose floundering campaign has suffered repeated false steps and who largely hung back during the debate, jumped into the fold on that topic.

When moderator MacCallum introduced the thorny question of abortion, which has energized Democratic voters since Roe v Wade was overturned, the candidates raced to claim their anti-abortion bona fides while splitting over the question of a federal ban.

Read the full report by Alice Herman here.

What to expect when Trump turns himself in at Fulton county jail

Hugo Lowell

Donald Trump is expected to surrender at the Fulton county jail on Thursday evening on racketeering and conspiracy charges over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state of Georgia.

The surrender itself is expected to be mundane. At the Rice Street jail north-west of downtown Atlanta, where defendants charged in Fulton county are typically taken, the booking process involves a mugshot, fingerprinting and having height and weight recorded.

Trump asked his lawyers and the US secret service to get him an exemption from being photographed, according to sources, though it was not clear whether he will get special treatment. The Fulton county sheriff, Patrick Labat, has previously said Trump would be treated no differently.

The other 18 co-defendants in the 2020 election subversion case appear to be receiving regular treatment based on online jail records for the former Trump election lawyer John Eastman and others, who had their height, weight and personal appearance made public.

Once the booking is complete, Trump is expected to be released immediately on conditions that include stringent witness intimidation restrictions that have not been put in place for his co-defendants, court filings show, until he is due back in state court for arraignment.

Donald Trump has shaken up his legal team just hours ahead of his expected surrender to authorities in Fulton county on charges over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state of Georgia.

Drew Findling is expected to depart the team and be replaced by Steven Sadow, a veteran criminal defense lawyer, the New York Times reported.

Findling has served as lead attorney for Trump as it relates to the over two-year probe by the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, into efforts by the former president and his allies to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.

Another attorney, Jennifer Little, is expected to remain and work with Sadow, ABC reported.

Good morning, US politics blog readers. Donald Trump is expected to surrender at the Fulton county jail in Atlanta today on racketeering and conspiracy charges over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state of Georgia.

“I’ll be going to Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday to be ARRESTED,” the former US president posted on his Truth Social platform earlier this week. The date was set during negotiations between Trump’s lawyers and the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, at her office on Monday.

Trump became a criminal defendant in a fourth case last week when a grand jury handed up a sprawling 41-count indictment that accused Trump and 18 co-defendants of engaging in a criminal enterprise and committing election fraud in trying to reverse his 2020 defeat. He has denied wrongdoing in Georgia and in three other indictments which have produced a total of 91 criminal charges.

On Wednesday, Trump shared a screenshot of a tweet promoting a protest outside the Fulton county jail ahead of his expected surrender. The rally, promoted by the far-right activist Laura Loomer, is expected to begin at 10am Eastern time with attendees encouraged to bring their Trump-related flags, hats, shirts, signs and “love” to support the former president.

Meanwhile, Trump’s shadow loomed large on the first Republican primary debate stage last night in Milwaukee, as eight candidates attempted to cast themselves as viable alternatives to the former president. Despite his absence, they seemed to somewhat hold back from criticizing Trump, as Fox debate moderator Bret Baier put it, “the elephant not in the room”.