Judge dismisses Trump’s countersuit against E Jean Carroll that claimed she defamed him – live | US politics

Hello, I am Abené Clayton, a west coast reporter taking over the blog from my colleague Chris.

I’ll be keeping an eye on the clock as Trump’s attorneys the 5pm eastern time deadline for Donald Trump’s attorneys response to a request for a protective order in the January 6 case from special counsel Jack Smith, over a statement Trump made Friday: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” Trump, however, argued he was just exercising his right to free speech.

There’s no telling when it might happen, but Donald Trump could very well soon be indicted by a grand jury in Georgia’s Fulton county for his campaign’s attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state three years ago.

All signs point to Trump being among those targeted by Fani Willis, the Atlanta-area district attorney investigating the election subversion effort by the former president and his allies. She has said a decision on who to bring charges against will be made before September.

CNN reported today that the street outside the Fulton county courthouse has been closed to the public in advance of the expected indictment:

A battle is brewing between the Biden administration and America’s electrical utilities, the Guardian’s Dharna Noor and Floodlight’s Kristi Swartz report. At issue are policies intended to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, but which the utilities argue are too strict and complicated to carry out:

The main lobbying group for US electric utilities plans to oppose a Biden administration proposal to curb greenhouse gas emissions from existing gas power plants, raising questions about the industry’s commitment to reducing planet-heating pollution.

The pushback will put the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) out of step with many of its members’ stated commitments to cut emissions, critics say. It also runs counters to the US voters’ political views based on new polling shared exclusively with the Guardian and Floodlight.

The power plant rules, first proposed in May, would force power providers to clean up certain large coal- and gas-fired plants, either by installing new greener technologies or shutting the projects down. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is asking states and utilities to submit plans on how they choose to limit those emissions within 24 months of the rules’ final approval.

Public comments must be submitted by 8 August.

The Guardian’s Chris McGreal has taken a closer look at the argument, made by many Republicans, of a link between asylum seekers and America’s struggles with fentanyl, and finds that the rhetoric does not match the facts:

Republican politicians have been accused of exploiting the tragedy of America’s fentanyl crisis by blaming Joe Biden for the rising death toll, and linking it to his immigration policies and populist anger over the US’s troubled southern border.

Critics say Republican leaders are guilty of a cynical political ploy by misrepresenting an increase in asylum seekers as a cause of the serious problem of cross-border drug smuggling driving a huge US public health crisis.

Fentanyl kills about 70,000 Americans a year. It is the leading cause of record drug overdose deaths in the US and the primary cause of death among adults under the age of 45.

The synthetic opioid, usually made from chemicals manufactured in China and put together in Mexico, is popular with drug cartels because it is many times more powerful than other narcotics and so requires smaller quantities, which are easier to smuggle than heroin or cocaine.

It is then laced into other drugs to boost their power and value. But because small amounts of the narcotic as so strong, fentanyl has driven up the number of accidental overdoses and deaths.

The Republicans’ push to blame the Biden administration follows record seizures of fentanyl at the US’s south-western frontier. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has discovered three times as much of the drug so far this year as during the same period in 2022. If seizures continue at that rate, CBP is on course to confiscate enough fentanyl in 2023 to kill close to a billion people – and that is almost certainly only a fraction of the drug smuggled into the US.

The Republican party claims this is evidence that “cartels have operational control of the border”. The speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, tied the sharp increase in fentanyl seizures and deaths to the record number of undocumented migrants entering the US last year, and blamed the White House for letting them in. So did Congresswoman Mary Miller when she claimed that Biden and the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, “opened our borders and flooded our streets with fentanyl”.

When Ron DeSantis was looking for someone to blame for the escalating death toll from the supercharged opioid his eye naturally fell on Biden.

When special counsel Jack Smith indicted Donald Trump last week over the failed plot to overturn the 2020 election, he referenced the actions of six co-conspirators, but did not name them.

However, one of them is believed to be John Eastman, who served as Trump’s attorney and was an architect of the legal strategy intended to stop Joe Biden from entering the White House.

He’s in the midst of defending his law license in California, where legal authorities have accused him of violating a number of ethics rules by participating in the election subversion attempt. Politico reports today that Eastman is seeking to have the disbarment proceedings postponed, because he is worried he may soon face criminal charges:

“[R]ecent developments in the investigation have renewed and intensified [Eastman’s] concerns that the federal government might bring charges against him,” his attorneys Randall Miller and Zachary Mayer wrote in an Aug. 4 filing posted to the court’s public docket on Monday.

Miller said the growing concern about criminal charges might prompt Eastman to assert his Fifth Amendment rights during disbarment proceedings. The Fifth Amendment generally allows people to refuse to provide testimony that could be used against them. But invoking the Fifth Amendment in the disbarment proceedings would jeopardize Eastman’s ability to defend his law license, his lawyers wrote.

“[Eastman] requests that the Court exercise its discretion to stay the State Bar’s disciplinary proceeding against him pending resolution of a parallel criminal investigation being conducted by Special Counsel Jack Smith and any trial or other proceedings that may result from that investigation,” Miller and Mayer wrote.

Bar discipline authorities have charged Eastman with multiple violations of professional rules and ethics — as well as the law — in his effort to upend the certified results of the 2020 election. Eastman’s bar discipline trial began in June — and he had even testified for several hours without asserting his Fifth Amendment rights. But it was postponed to late August after the proceedings ran longer than the initially anticipated two weeks.

Eastman is asking that the proceedings be postponed yet again until the resolution of Smith’s newly filed criminal case — in which Trump is, at least so far, the only defendant. If the disciplinary judge, Yvette Roland, denies that request, Eastman is asking her for a three-month delay to see whether he has been charged by then.

In recent months, several supreme court justices have been the subject of media reports outlining ties between them and parties with interests in their cases.

And while most of the justices scrutinized have belonged to the court’s six-member conservative majority, the Associated Press last month reported that liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor’s staff have prodded institutions where she appears to buy her book.

In an opinion article published today in the Washington Post, Margaret McMullan, an organizer of the Mississippi Book Festival, published her account of inviting Sotomayor to speak in 2019 – noting that the justice turned down a modest stipend and didn’t seem that interested in selling her book:

Subsequent emails and phone conversations were similar. No, Le said, the justice did not need us to provide lunch or dinner. No, she could not accept the $250 stipend.

Did Le urge me to buy more books? No. She did ask whether we wanted any of the copies of “My Beloved World” to be in Spanish. In fact, we did, and I hadn’t thought to order them.

When Sotomayor came to Jackson, we had her speaking in the sanctuary at Galloway Memorial United Methodist Church, the church where Eudora Welty once worshiped. Backstage, Sotomayor smiled when she saw my clipboard of questions. She helped me with my tote bag full of books. She then clapped her hands together and said something like, “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

In addition to our planned onstage interview, she said, she wanted the freedom to go off-script. “They’re children,” I recall her saying. “I want to be sure I get to their questions.”

“Perfect,” I said.

She concludes:

There very well might be a culture of poor ethical conduct in the Supreme Court, but there is no moral equivalency between justices accepting rides on private jets to vacation with friends who had cases before the court and Sotomayor talking about her books and her life to a crowd of mesmerized young readers.

The standard royalty rate for authors is less than 10 percent of the sales price. I don’t know anything about Sotomayor’s deal with her publishers, but 10 percent would make her cut of the 1,500 books our foundation purchased approximately $2,250 — for which she had to fly to Mississippi and give two presentations. During the hottest month of the year.

Was that a bribe? You be the judge.

It’s not the first time someone who knows the justices has spoken out to defend their ethics. Harlan Crow, the billionaire and Republican donor who was reported to have taken conservative justice Clarence Thomas on luxury trips, has given multiple interviews in which he denied there being anything improper about their relationship.

Robert Reich: Will Trump be jailed before trial?

Martin Pengelly

The day so far

Donald Trump’s legal troubles have made plenty of news, but are they causing his supporters to change their minds? The Guardian’s Chris McGreal has a reality check from Iowa, the first state to vote in the GOP primary process:

From his corner of rural Iowa, Neil Shaffer did more than his fair share to put Donald Trump in the White House and to try to keep him there.

Shaffer oversaw the biggest swing of any county in the US from Barack Obama to Trump in 2016, and increased the then president’s share of the vote four years later. But the chair of the Howard county Republican party is not enthusiastic at the prospect of yet another Trump presidential campaign, and he blames the Democrats for driving it.

“Honestly, the Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot with these prosecutions,” he said. “Why is Trump doing so well? Because people feel like they are piling on him. If this is the Democrats’ effort to make him look bad, it hasn’t. It’s probably going to make him the [Republican] nominee and, honestly, he may win the general election again. And then whose fault would it be?”

After pleading not guilty on Thursday to federal charges over his attempts to steal the 2020 presidential election, Trump denounced the indictment as “a persecution of a political opponent”.

“If you can’t beat him, you persecute him or you prosecute him,” he said.

Judge tosses Trump countersuit against E Jean Carroll