Key events
Several Republican presidential candidates have vowed that, in the as-of-now unlikely scenario that they are elected to the White House next year, they would pardon Donald Trump. But as the Guardian’s Ramon Antonio Vargas reports, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson is trying to distinguish himself by promising to do no such thing:
Former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson has said it is “inappropriate” for some of his fellow Republican presidential hopefuls to publicly discuss potentially pardoning Donald Trump, who is their party’s frontrunner for its 2024 nomination despite his mounting criminal charges.
“Anybody who promises pardons during a presidential campaign is not serving our system of justice well,” Hutchinson said Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation. “And it’s inappropriate.”
The remarks from Hutchinson cut a stark contrast with comments from other Republicans in the running for the presidency, who said they would pardon Trump if they eventually defeated the Democratic incumbent, Joe Biden.
Nikki Haley, once South Carolina’s governor and the Trump White House’s United Nations ambassador, has said she would be inclined to pardon the former president if she won the election to help the country “move forward”.
Former New York city police commissioner Bernard Kerik, a leading Trump ally, will meet with special counsel Jack Smith in the coming days as part of the federal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Kerik’s attorney told CNN on Sunday that the special counsel’s office will meet with Kerik and his lawyers “in about a week” to discuss efforts taken by former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate potential election fraud in the wake of the 2020 election. He said:
We have a meeting scheduled in about a week with the special counsel’s office to talk about a lot of the efforts that the Giuliani team was taking at the time to investigate fraud, and that’s really going to get into, you know, the core of whether they can charge somebody with having corrupt intent.
The meeting will come after Kerik turned over thousands of pages of documents to the special counsel’s office connected to the debunked voter fraud claims made by Trump and Giuliani.
In early 2020, Trump pardoned Kerik for crimes including tax fraud and lying to investigators, for which Kerik had been sentenced to four years in jail. Later that year, Kerik worked with Giuliani on attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory, a push which culminated in the failed but deadly January 6 attack on Congress.
Trump expects to be indicted ‘any day now’ on January 6 charges
Donald Trump said he expects he could be indicted “any day now” as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection.
Smith has been looking into Trump’s efforts to remain in office following his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden. Federal prosecutors have assembled evidence to charge Trump with three crimes, the Guardian has reported: obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and a statute that makes it unlawful to conspire to violate civil rights.
Trump, posting to Truth Social on Monday, wrote:
I assume that an Indictment from Deranged Jack Smith and his highly partisan gang of Thugs, pertaining to my “PEACEFULLY & PATRIOTICALLY Speech, will be coming out any day now, as yet another attempt to cover up all of the bad news about bribes, payoffs, and extortion, coming from the Biden ‘camp.’ This seems to be the way they do it. ELECTION INTERFERENCE! PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT!
Carlos De Oliveira, the Mar-a-Lago property manager and third co-defendant in the special counsel’s classified documents case, declined to answer questions as he left the Miami courthouse.
De Oliveira was escorted by federal agents and his attorney, John Irving, who said it was time for the justice department “to put their money where their mouth is” after charging his client.
De Oliveira was added as a third defendant in Donald Trump’s complicated classified documents indictment on Thursday. He faces charges such as trying to obstruct justice, concealing records and documents, and making false statements to the FBI.
De Oliveira, 56, was a valet, maintenance worker and more recently a property manager at Trump’s resort, Mar-a-Lago, according to the superseding indictment. The indictment said De Oliveira helped Trump’s personal valet, Walt Nauta, move 30 boxes of documents, from Trump’s residence to a storage room, and asked the person responsible for surveillance at the resort to delete the footage on behalf of Trump. He was also accused of draining the resort pool to flood the rooms that contained surveillance footage.
When the FBI discovered the documents at Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, Trump allegedly called De Oliveira and said he would get him an attorney.
Trump co-defendant Carlos De Oliveira makes first court appearance
Carlos De Oliveira, the property manager of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, made his first appearance in a Miami courtroom on Monday as part of the special counsel’s investigation into the former president’s alleged mishandling of classified documents.
During the roughly 10-minute hearing, De Oliveira, the third and newest co-defendant in Trump’s classified documents case, heard the charges against him and received pre-trial orders. He was unable to enter a plea because he had failed to secure local counsel.
Chief Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres granted an extension request, and the arraignment is now scheduled to take place on 10 August at the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce, Florida. De Oliveira was released on a $100,000 bond pending trial.
De Oliveira was indicted on Thursday on four charges, including conspiracy to obstruct justice and making false statements to the FBI.
Trump and his longtime valet, Walt Nauta, were charged in the classified documents case last month and face additional counts in the indictment that charged De Oliveira. Both Trump and Nauta have pleaded not guilty to the initial charges.
The day so far
A judge in Georgia turned down an attempt by Donald Trump to stop Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis’s investigation into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election result in the state. Over the weekend, Willis said she could announce charges in the case anytime between now and the first day of September. Meanwhile, a former business partner of Hunter Biden reported for an interview with the Republican-led House oversight committee, as the GOP toys with the idea of starting impeachment proceedings against Joe Biden when they return from their August recess.
Here’s what else has happened today:
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Trump is in a historically good position to win the Republican presidential primary, CNN concludes.
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At a weekend rally in Pennsylvania, Trump called for stopping aid to Ukraine until the government helps prove alleged corruption by the Biden family.
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Ron DeSantis’s once-promising presidential campaign is suffering from both Republican defections and his own missteps.
A CNN analysis published on Sunday finds Donald Trump’s poll numbers add up to a commanding lead in the Republican primary, and any candidate who manages to overcome it would essentially be making history.
Here’s the gist of their findings:
Trump is not only in a historically strong position for a nonincumbent to win the Republican nomination, but he is in a better position to win the general election than at any point during the 2020 cycle and almost at any point during the 2016 cycle.
No one in Trump’s current polling position in the modern era has lost an open presidential primary that didn’t feature an incumbent. He’s pulling in more than 50% of support in the national primary polls, i.e., more than all his competitors combined.
Three prior candidates in open primaries were pulling in more than half the vote in primary surveys in the second half of the calendar year before the election: Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush in 2000 and Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016. Gore remains the only nonincumbent to win every single presidential nominating contest, while Bush and Clinton never lost their national polling advantage in their primaries.
Today, Trump’s closest primary competitor, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has fallen below 20% nationally. No other contender is at or above 10%. This makes the margin between Trump and the rest of the field north of 30 points on average.
A look back at past polls does show candidates coming back from deficits greater than 10 points to win the nomination, but none greater than 30 points at this point. In fact, the biggest comebacks when you average all the polls in the second half of the year before the election top out at about 20 points (Democrats George McGovern in 1972, Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008).
CNN also finds that polls taken thus far show Trump mounting a dangerous challenge to Joe Biden, though with the election more than a year away, there are plenty of chances for that to change:
What should arguably be more amazing is that despite most Americans agreeing that Trump’s two indictments thus far were warranted, he remains competitive in a potential rematch with President Joe Biden. A poll out last week from Marquette University Law School had Biden and Trump tied percentage-wise (with a statistically insignificant few more respondents choosing Trump).
The Marquette poll is one of a number of surveys showing Trump either tied or ahead of Biden. The ABC News/Washington Post poll has published three surveys of the matchup between the two, and Trump has come out ahead – albeit within the margin of error – every time. Other pollsters have shown Biden only narrowly ahead.
Over the weekend, Donald Trump held a rally in Pennsylvania, a swing state crucial to winning the White House, and made a demand that will be familiar to those who remember his stint as president.
The Washington Post reports that Trump said: “Congress should refuse to authorize a single additional shipment of our depleted weapons stockpiles … to Ukraine until the FBI, DOJ and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden Crime Family’s corrupt business dealings.”
It wasn’t that far removed from his actions in 2019 when, as president, he blocked aid to Ukraine then, on a phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskiy, tried to get the Ukrainian president to cooperate with his administration in investigating Hunter Biden. That led to Democrats, who then controlled the House, impeaching Trump, though he was ultimately acquitted by the GOP-controlled Senate.
Much has changed in the intervening three-plus years. Republicans now control the House, and Democrats the Senate, while Joe Biden is in the White House and Trump is just a candidate. But some things aren’t so different. Republicans seem willing to use their House majority to impeach Biden, but his conviction appears likely to be turned down by the Senate – a reversal of the dynamics that played out three years ago. Russia’s aggression in Ukraine has, of course, become worse, but as his comments this weekend make clear, Trump seems ready to use the nation as a pawn for his political designs.
One of the biggest surprises of the presidential campaign season thus far is the flame-out of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign. The Florida governor has raked in cash, secured endorsements and bent the state legislature to his will, all in service to his presidential aspirations, but is getting defeated handily by Donald Trump in the polls. From Miami, the Guardian’s Richard Luscombe looks into why:
Ron DeSantis is facing growing backlash in Florida as his presidential campaign flails across the country. Analysts and political opponents are seeing signs of a tail-off in his support, and evidence of Republicans recoiling at his extremist positions on slavery, education, abortion and immigration.
Hints at a shift in his standing came towards the end of the recently concluded legislative session in his home state, when several Republican lawmakers defied the governor by voting against new laws restricting abortions or expanding his feud with Disney. They passed anyway.
But observers say the strength of the resistance appears to have gathered pace since DeSantis’s glitch-ridden presidential campaign launch in May, and subsequent missteps on the stump.
This morning, the New York Times and Siena College released a poll that confirms Donald Trump’s popularity among Republicans, despite the legal troubles facing him.
The former president is far and away the frontrunner for the party’s presidential nomination, with 54% support the survey finds. His closest competitor is Florida governor Ron DeSantis, but even that’s a generous description, because the poll has him at a measly 17%. No other candidate cracks double-digit support, or even comes close. Mike Pence, Tim Scott and Nikki Haley all poll at 3%.
Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer has arrived for his interview with the Republican-led House oversight committee.
As CBS News reports, he declined to answer questions from reporters:
Former Hunter Biden business partner Devon Archer arrives for transcribed interview GOP-led house oversight. @CBS_Herridge “What will you tell congressional investigators about Hunter Biden’s business deals?”
Devon Archer: “No comment.”Herridge: “Are White House denials about… pic.twitter.com/YsXKtSvWW7
— Catherine Herridge (@CBS_Herridge) July 31, 2023
Over the weekend, Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis told Atlanta’s WXIA that her office was “ready to go” when it comes to deciding charges in the long-running investigation into the attempt by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election.
Willis reiterated that charging decisions will be announced by the first day of September. Here are her full comments:
“The work is accomplished. We’ve been working for 2.5 years. We’re ready to go.”
— Fulton County DA Fani Willis reaffirmed she will announce charging decisions by September 1 in her investigation into Donald Trump/his allies in Georgia pic.twitter.com/1iM4d0rrpi
— The Recount (@therecount) July 31, 2023
Judge denies Trump attempt to block potential prosecution in Georgia
A superior court judge in Georgia has rejected an attempt by Donald Trump to derail district attorney Fani Willis’s investigation into his campaign to overturn the 2020 election result in the state.
The ruling by judge Robert McBurney is in response to a motion Trump filed in March seeking to block a grand jury report ordered by Willis and stop it from being used in any prosecutions. Willis has said that indictments in the case could come anytime between now and the end of August.
“The movants’ asserted ‘injuries’ that would open the doors of the courthouse to their claims are either insufficient or else speculative and unrealized. They are insufficient because, while being the subject (or even target) of a highly publicized criminal investigation is likely an unwelcome and unpleasant experience, no court ever has held that that status alone provides a basis for the courts to interfere with or halt the investigation,” McBurney wrote.
He added that the request to block the report’s use “is not what either statutory or case law generally allows”, and also rejected Trump’s request that Willis be removed from the case.
Lawyer rejects GOP speculation that justice department wants former Hunter Biden business partner in jail before testimony
Last year, Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer was sentenced to a year in prison on fraud charges unrelated to his dealings with the president’s son. Archer has yet to turn himself in, but on Saturday, the justice department wrote to the judge handling his case and asked that a date be scheduled for Archer to begin his sentence.
The following day, on Fox News, James Comer, the Republican chair of the House oversight committee, said it was “odd” that prosecutors would request Archer report to prison just before he was scheduled to meet with the panel’s investigators.
Comer and fellow GOP lawmakers have long insinuated that the justice department is covering up for the Biden family, but Matthew Schwartz, an attorney for Archer, rejected the chair’s allegation.
“We are aware of speculation that the Department of Justice’s weekend request to have Mr. Archer report to prison is an attempt by the Biden administration to intimidate him in advance of his meeting with the House Oversight Committee on Monday,” Schwartz said in a statement obtained by CNN.
“To be clear, Mr. Archer does not agree with that speculation. In any case, Mr. Archer will do what he has planned to do all along, which is to show up on Monday and to honestly answer the questions that are put to him by the Congressional investigators.”
Amid impeachment threats, House GOP to question Hunter Biden’s former business partner
Good morning, US politics blog readers. Joe Biden is on vacation and House and Senate lawmakers are on their August recess, but not everyone in Congress is taking a holiday. Investigators with the Republican-led House oversight committee will today sit down for an interview with Devon Archer, the former business partner of Hunter Biden. The committee has taken the lead in the GOP’s quest to prove corruption on the part of the Bidens, and while we may not find out what Archer told them for weeks to come, the ultimate goals of the GOP’s investigation may soon become clear.
In recent days, top Republicans, including speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, have openly mused about impeaching the president. No such inquiry would start till September, when their break is over, and, at this point, impeachment looks more political than practical: with the Senate in Democratic hands, the chances of Biden being removed from the White House are slim to none. House GOP has, however, not yet definitively said if they’ll go through with it, but expect to hear plenty of saber rattling in the weeks to come.
Here’s what else is happening today:
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Ron DeSantis, whose presidential campaign at this point appears to be well off the rails, sits down for an interview with Fox News that will air at 6pm eastern time.
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Kamala Harris spoke with ABC News in an interview that will air at 7pm eastern time, though portions of her remarks have already been broadcast.
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A New York Times/Siena poll has found what almost all the other polls before it have found: Donald Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.
